


the job they didn't have to do

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Angst and Tragedy, Ankh-Morpork, Ankh-Morpork City Watch, BAMF Women, Bearded Dwarf Women, Canon-Typical Racism, Clacks (Discworld), Class Differences, Cultural Differences, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Dwarf Gender Concepts, Dwarves, F/M, Female Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Klatch, Motherhood, POV Female Character, Past Miscarriages, Pseudopolis, Rebuilding, Scheming, Spies & Secret Agents, The Other Leg of the Trousers of Time from Jingo, Trolls, War, War Crimes, Widowed, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:28:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23263978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Three people watching Lady Sybil Vimes, after the Sack of Ankh-Morpork by the Klatchian Empire, but before the Restoration of Havelock Vetinari, Patrician.
Relationships: 71-Hour Ahmed & Prince Cadram, 71-Hour Ahmed & Prince Khufurah, 71-Hour Ahmed & Samuel Vimes, Angua von Uberwald & Elsa von Uberwald, Angua von Uberwald & Samuel Vimes, Angua von Uberwald & her family, Carrot Ironfoundersson/Angua von Uberwald, Cheery Littlebottom & Angua von Uberwald, Rosemary "Rosie" Palm & Havelock Vetinari, Sandra Battye & Rosemary "Rosie" Palm, Sybil Ramkin & Angua von Uberwald, Sybil Ramkin & Havelock Vetinari, Sybil Ramkin & Rosemary "Rosie" Palm, Sybil Ramkin & Susan Sto Helit, Sybil Ramkin & Willikins, Sybil Ramkin/Samuel Vimes
Comments: 51
Kudos: 99





	1. Rosie Palm's Decision

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Français available: [La tâche qui ne leur incombait pas](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25047151) by [traitor_for_hire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/traitor_for_hire/pseuds/traitor_for_hire)



> This is the most canon-compliant AU I have ever written. It is directly based off the Disorganiser that Vimes has in Jingo, where he makes the key decision to follow Angua to Klatch, and (at the very moment that the Trousers of Time bifurcate) darts back into his office and grabs the Disorganiser of his parallel universe counterpart off the desk by accident. Canon therefore records a tenth of what would have happened, if Vimes had not embraced his role as a thief-taker, and stayed behind. This is my version of the other nine-tenths.
> 
> I would like to thank Niamh for egging me on, Margz for acting as my beta, and the late, great Terry Pratchett for writing so many women I barely invented any. 
> 
> How do they rise up?

_Someone’s behind this. Someone wants to see a war. Someone paid to have Ossie and Snowy killed. Someone wanted the Prince dead. I’ve got to remember that. This isn’t a war. It’s a crime._

_-_ _Jingo, Terry Pratchett_

By nightfall, the city was on fire.

This wasn’t an enormous surprise to Mrs. Rosie Palm, who had seen a lot in a life of respectable (and unrespectable) length, and who fully expected to see a lot more. Ankh-Morpork burned fairly frequently, though less so now that Vetinari was Patrician - or perhaps it would be better to say _under Vetinari’s rule_ , since the man was still theoretically somewhere in the Patrician’s Palace, locked up on gardening leave while Lord Rust prosecuted the war. But his lordship seemed to be on the defensive now - and losing badly too. Besides, Rosie had spoken to him after he took over but before he took ship, and she’d bet her favourite shoes that Lord Rust didn’t actually know where his supposed civilian counterpart was. A largely wooden, highly crowded city, a flammable population, lots and lots of explosive industry, and the man in charge of the sprinkler system gone missing… really, it hardly needed the Klatchian artillery. 

The Klatchian artillery were here anyway, and that was what was making Rosie nervous. Fires she had known from her earliest teenage years, when she’d come to Ankh-Morpork to sew fine linen and silk and figured out from the seamstresses who bought her best work that there were quicker and more straightforward ways for a sharp young woman to earn a crust. Fires were normal, invading armies less so, and they presented a significantly greater threat to the five hundred or so seamstresses of varying ranks and ages Rosie, as Guildmistress, was responsible for. Perhaps half had taken off of their own accord - foreigners returning home, often taking a Morporkian friend or two along - and Rosie had sent most of the remainder north two days ago, when news of the rout at Al-Gebra had percolated back to Ankh-Morpork. They would be past Quirm by now, headed towards Genua, women under twenty-five Rosie could still give orders to and trusted colleagues who could get them safely where they needed to go. The Guild’s standing arrangement with Lady Roberta de Meserole, elderly now and residing in Genua’s warmer climate for her health but still a woman who knew a little something about Ankh-Morporkian political upheaval, would protect them. The fifty or so remaining in Ankh-Morpork, like Rosie, couldn’t countenance leaving the place: local girls, women with families. Most of them wouldn’t go if Rosie told them to. And Rosie wouldn’t leave them without even the flimsy protection of their Guildmistress.

Klatch didn’t recognise a Seamstresses’ Guild. They didn’t have a guild system full stop. The Ankh-Morporkian guilds could only hope that Prince Cadram would be a pragmatist; it was much too late to hope that Rust’s forces would turn him back. Vimes’ regiment - the Watch, for all it wasn’t on the recruiting posters – would try to hold the Klatchians, and if anyone could do it, it would be them. Good Morporkian boys, girls, trolls, dwarfs and other, dirty fighters, who knew this city inside out, knew how she could take an invader in and digest it, and intended to take part in the digesting…

But the city was on fire and the Watch were going to die out there. 

Rosie had given the order to barricade the doors of the Seamstresses’ Guildhouse when darkness fell and the first fires caught. There were ways into the undercity… she knew a few of them, from old Snapcase’s day. She’d intended to take her girls that way, if things got any tougher. But then before the doors had closed Constable Haddock, Corporal Haddock now, had run through them with a message from Lady Sybil Vimes.

If she hadn’t been Guildmistress Rosie would have sat down flat on the well-polished floor. Women like Lady Sybil weren’t really even supposed to _know_ of women like Rosie. But Lady Sybil had never paid much attention to that. She was a good-hearted, jolly woman, whose kindness went with Sam Vimes’ cynicism like sweet and sour sauce, and in their few conversations Rosie had always found her good company. 

Because she was, in fact, Guildmistress, and now wasn’t the time to pass out, Rosie grounded her feet on the parquet and stayed standing. She stared wordlessly between the elegant compliments card (powder blue, gilded edging, expensive lightfast black ink) and Haddock.

“She’s aware we’re not really nurses,” Rosie said to Haddock. The compliments card had _At Home_ printed on top of it. Lady Sybil hadn’t crossed that out.

“At the risk of a clip round the ear, ma’am, who knows the human body better than a seamstress?” Haddock said. “Better than some of the people that get paid to watch the sick.”

Rosie glanced back down at the card, which invited Mrs. Rosetta Palm (Guildmistress) to assist in the formation of the Lady Sybil Vimes Emergency Hospital, Number One, Scoone Avenue. Lady Sybil’s house was like a fortress; of course it was, Sam Vimes lived there, and so did a large number of dragons. Nurses were respectable women in any society, with legitimate reasons to have access to poison and sharp knives, and they were essential to any army. And at the Lady Sybil Vimes Emergency Hospital, they would be surrounded by people. Safety wasn’t necessarily in numbers, but there was definitely danger in isolation. Lady Sybil was the kind of old-style aristocrat who would never surrender people under her protection, and Vimes would never have left his beloved wife completely unprotected, even as he fought for their city.

Rosie raised her voice. “What a thoughtful offer,” she said. “We will certainly accept. Ladies, please gather your things and be here in ten minutes, we will be making a social call. Bring some practical clothing; there will be a job of work for us to do, and I am sad to say it may not relate to our professional competencies.” Except for Sister Myrtle, a woman with a bedside manner in more senses than one. “Sandra, could you please step down to the cellar with Crystal and fetch Dr Lawn and his equipment, it’ll be needed.” 

She’d practically had to lock Mossy in downstairs, but she’d seen him right through one revolution. She wasn’t losing him to this. As for Crystal, she was one of only three trolls serving as ladies and gentlemen of negotiable affection on the Guild’s books (Rosie’s mental catalogue flicked through pages in her mind: the other nine were associate members, more properly affiliated with the Guild of Bouncers, Heavies and Minions, and she’d assured herself that her responsibilities towards them were fulfilled yesterday, at the same time as she’d sent Emerald and Pyrite to escort a small party headed north for Mistress Weatherwax in Lancre). Not only could Crystal carry Mossy’s equipment, she could carry him too if necessary. 

“Cup of tea, Constable Haddock?” she enquired absently. “Oh, I beg your pardon. Corporal.”

“I like Constable better,” Haddock said, “And I wouldn’t say no to a drop of something stronger, ma’am.”

“Sensible lad,” Rosie said, meaning both. She poured a quarter-inch of golden liquid into the bottom of a delicate Agatean teacup intended for display. She enjoyed a good cognac, but in times of stress there was nothing like scumble, even if you did have to buy the hipflask special. She handed the cup to Haddock. “How bad is it out there, Haddock? We can see the army from the roof.” Drawn up outside the city, the navy afloat and waiting in the estuary. Rosie had to assume they would strike overnight.

“Sir Samuel and Captain Carrot haven’t given up yet, Mrs. Palm. They’ll surrender if the Klatchians offer terms, they’ll fight if not. First priority is to keep the city alive.”

“Good men.” Rosie poured her own scumble. “Prince Cadram would settle, I think.”

It wasn’t a question, but it was meant to have the same effect. Haddock, clearly one of Vimes’ smarter lads, didn’t take the bait. No doubt he knew as well as Rosie that nobody had seen any evidence that reputedly moderate, reasonable Prince Cadram was directing the invasion.

Rosie sighed and sipped at the scumble as the first seamstresses started to trickle back into the hall with their belongings ready packed. “So Vimes has detailed you to watch out for Lady Sybil?”

“Be her eyes and ears, sort of thing, ma’am,” Haddock agreed. Rosie eyeballed him. He had a neutral accent, could have been anywhere from Dimwell to Shades if he turned it up or turned it down, and a forgettable sort of face. Take him out of uniform and he’d disappear. 

Crystal and Sandra escorted Mossy upstairs, not without an argument. Good old Mossy. He could talk the hind leg off a donkey, especially if it was trying to do him good, and the day wasn’t complete if it didn’t contain either an unusual case of the pox or a really satisfying argument before breakfast. Rosie had received a copy of his latest _Diseases of the Human (Genital Edition)_ free and gratis - the expensive one with the colour plates - and some day she might forgive him for splashing out on the fully illustrated version.

“What the hell’s all this about?” Mossy demanded. Presumably neither Crystal nor Sandra had explained what was happening: Rosie didn’t feel equal to it herself.

“Lady Sybil Vimes is founding a hospital,” Rosie said. She finished her scumble, feeling it roar down her throat, and read the words on the card one last time before tucking it into her extensive cleavage and pulling on a plain but sensible travelling coat that concealed more than it revealed. “We’re all invited.” 

And now Haddock had brought them to Number Two, Scoone Avenue, and from the top of the drive, Rosie looked back over the sluggish Ankh - rumour had it the Klatchian navy were having a lot of trouble sailing up it, which was the only saving grace in this otherwise wholly disastrous situation - and saw the city was already burning freely. It was now full dark, and though the Klatchian troops were not moving the artillery were steadily working, flinging balls of fire into the city and its defences. They must hope to soften the Ankh-Morporkians up before striking, or force a surrender. 

“Doesn’t look good for our boys and girls,” she said to Haddock. She had some trouble getting it out through the lump in her throat. Lady Sybil’s excellent staff, first cut down to a skeleton by the war and then rapidly expanded by the invasion (there were a lot of young people who would be much better up here in livery than down there in a soldier's uniform), had already absorbed most of Rosie’s ladies and welcomed them in. There were soft words for the few crying girls and a bracing cup of tea for the shaken women, and Rosie had had a second gulp of scumble herself. With Dottie, Sadie and Haddock along, they’d had no trouble getting through the panicked streets, but the sobbing, the barred shutters, and the faint scent of smoke had chased them all through the city. The road and river gates had been struck with flaming projectiles the size of carts when they were crossing the Ankh, and even Haddock had almost started to run at the sound. Rosie had seen the halt in his gait.

If she listened hard, she couldn’t hear crackling or screams. She knew they were there.

“It doesn’t look nice, no,” Haddock said, pasty but gallant. She had snapped at him not to be so oily-tongued about half an hour ago, somewhere around Sator Square, where the local troll and dwarf population had decided that they might be trolls and dwarves but they were _Morporkian_ trolls and dwarves, and set up a barricade and a death canyon the Klatchians wouldn’t be dismantling in a hurry. Easygoing as ever, Haddock had simply dropped the title.

“Vimes would take it kindly if you stayed with his family,” Rosie said abruptly.

Haddock smiled. “No, he wouldn’t. That’s not what I was told off to do.”

Rosie sighed, and passed him the flask. “Keep it. It’s still mostly full. I reckon a bright boy like you can find a lot of uses for this stuff. Careful, though… it burns easily. Explodes, even, if you put a match to a glassful.”

“How big a glass?”

“A shot.”

Haddock saluted her with the hipflask. “Mrs. Palm, you’re a lady.”

“Constable Haddock, take that back or get out of my sight.”

Haddock grinned and slipped away into the twilit gardens, presumably to find some way out that didn’t involve being seen leaving. Rosie stood on the front steps, and watched the fires spread.

After a bit, Sandra came out and slipped an arm around her waist. She was still wearing the plain green dress she had left the Guildhouse in, but someone had provided her with a white cap and apron, and she had unpicked the tight sleeves to roll them up past her elbows and cuff them. 

“Isn’t it a bit late for a career change, Sandra?” Rosie said, putting her arm around her friend’s shoulders.

Sandra leaned into Rosie’s hug. “Lady Sybil has miles of material for bandages, but really no idea how to turn it into bandages unless they’re bandages for dragons. I’m just reapplying my skills.” 

“Certainly, Mrs. Battye.”

“That’s Matron Battye to you.” Sandra sighed. “Come in and stop staring at all this, Rosie. You’re only going to upset yourself.”

“Aren’t you upset?”

“Very, but I’m not looking at it. And I’m also not fixated on the city as something I created.”

“I’m not Vetinari, Sandra.”

“But he couldn’t have done it without you.”

“And all for nothing,” Rosie said. Her eyes prickled.

“I’m not counting him out,” Sandra said firmly. “Not even now. This is Ankh-Morpork. The Klatchians can take a bite out of us any day, but we’re poisonous, and we’ll poison them.”

“Very uplifting.” Rosie pinched the bridge of her nose. “By the time they die of food poisoning we’ll all be digested. Just out of interest, what are you going to do if the Klatchians come through the windows? Because all we have to defend us is the Watch and the Assassins. The Assassins have hunkered down to protect the kids at their school and they won’t come out for anything less than a million dollar bounty on Prince Cadram. The Watch are… well.”

It seemed tactless to say that the Watch would probably die down to the last man in the Watch commander’s home. Sam Vimes had not the tiniest tactful bone in him, but Rosie still felt the need to keep her mouth at least halfway shut. She still remembered skinny, bright-eyed young Vimes on the barricade at Tenth Egg Street. They’d both been hardly more than kids, though they’d been doing the jobs of grown men and women...

At least the tyrants before had been Ankh-Morporkian. They were of the city. The city gave them power. And it could take it away, too. Rosie hadn’t been there when Vetinari had killed Snapcase, but she had heard the stories. A Klatchian? Gods alone knew what the city would do. And whoever had tried to kill Prince Khufurah was still on the loose. Rosie kept her ears to the ground, she knew a thing or two, and she knew at least one Watch agent had pursued the killer to Klatch. Which either meant a very bold killer, or an attempt to clean up the succession and mask the murder by sparking the war. Or, Rosie supposed, both.

Rosie was suddenly flushed with rage. Her city. _Her city_. Morporkians might sell themselves at will, but they were weapons, not toys, and if Cadram didn’t watch it, he’d shoot himself in the foot and be billed for the privilege by the crossbow bolt.

“You’ve clenched your fists,” said Sandra, always a little bit too cool and reasonable. 

“Thank you, Sandra, I hadn’t noticed.” Rosie forcibly uncurled her fingers. “I suppose I’d better pay my respects to Lady Sybil.”

“She went up to the attic to make a sign. Sure you don’t want an apron and cap?”

“The attic?” Rosie said, and then added: “Absolutely not, Sandy. Bugger off.”

“I could make you a lovely silk one.” 

“Out of what? Knickers? No thank you.” Rosie took a deep breath and shifted on her toes. It felt like an age since she’d moved. “Go and see to Myrtle, won’t you. I don’t want anyone mistaking her for a real nurse. And don’t let anyone dress Crystal up as an orderly! This isn’t the time for the Dance of the Seventy Veils*!”

Lady Sybil Vimes was indeed up in the attic, skirts kilted, painting a sign on some leftover wood. It had Ramkin shields on it; going by the skill with which Lady Sybil had painted out whatever text had been there before, using a quick-dry wash, she could probably have replaced one of them with the new Vimes arms as well. But everyone knew Sir Samuel hated them with a passion, there was no time, and - perhaps most importantly - Sam Vimes currently represented the only effective opposition to the Klatchians. Displaying his arms wouldn’t be clever. Lady Sybil was clever, and she had a very deft touch with hand-lettering.

_Lady Sybil Vimes Emergency Hospital_. Rosie watched the words appear in the same neat lettering that had been on the bedsheet tied to the gates. She thought about suggesting that Lady Sybil remove the Vimes bit, but quickly decided against. The Vimeses were an odd couple, but infamously well-suited, and Lady Sybil’s set jaw had the look of a woman on her last nerve.

Rosie coughed. Lady Sybil did not stand.

“Thank you so much for coming, Mrs. Palm,” Lady Sybil said, rather muffled, because she had her tongue stuck between her teeth in concentration. “I was terribly worried about you and your ladies when I heard you were still in the city.”

“So good of you to think of us, your ladyship,” Rosie said, sitting down next to her. Lady Sybil’s wig was on skew-whiff. 

“Please. Sybil.”

“Then it’s Rosie. Can I help?”

“Not really, but I do appreciate the company.” Lady Sybil was touching up the lettering on the word Hospital. 

Rosie folded her hands in her lap. “Have you heard from Sir Samuel?”

“Not since this morning. He’ll be home when he can.”

Rosie swallowed the obvious words. “Your house seems to be rather full.”

“I will protect them.”

An interesting choice of words, Rosie thought, and remembered that a mob had once come to Scoone Avenue to kill the dragons. Vimes had sent them running, but Lady Sybil had stood between them and her pets first. “What’s your plan?”

“The Klatchians are not unreasonable. That much is right. I’ll shelter civilians. I won’t give trouble. And I’ll keep as many people as possible alive.” Lady Sybil sat back and inspected the lettering, then leaned forward to even up some of the capitals. “I’ve already been given assurances. The house is well-fortified to deter looters, and, well, when the commanding officer shows up to partake of my hospitality - which I expect he will because the Countess of Eorle left this morning and Lady Selachii took her daughters to the country last week - I will offer him a cup of tea.” She picked up a palette of coloured paints, and began to freshen up the shields. “I’m told the Klatchian opinion of Ankh-Morporkian medicine is low. I’m sure we can arrange for him to get a show he won’t be keen to see again.”

“Funny how I noticed a shortage of screaming, blood spatter, and missing limbs on my way up here,” Rosie said. She had noticed a lot of dirty, frightened people being shepherded into rooms where they could have a nice cup of tea and some bread and butter, trolleys of bandages, controlled hurrying, cans of hot water going in every direction and a strong smell of disinfectant coming from some wings, but that was a separate matter. “Does the Watch have an Igor?”

“No, but I’m acquainted with a couple. And the Duchess of Sto Helit - have you met her? Lovely girl, very practical, such striking looks - has brought some friends with her. Witches. Then of course there’s Dr Lawn, who you kindly brought with you.”

“An expensive endeavour,” Rosie commented, fascinated. 

Lady Sybil drew herself up. “Dishonour is cheap.”

You would say that, Rosie thought automatically, and opened her mouth to say something tactful when Lady Sybil added: “The Igors ask for very reasonable rates, the witches want paying in clean used clothing and whatever stores can be spared - which will be redistributed among exactly the people I want to help - and Dr Lawn seems like a man who would like to be chief surgeon at a free, or at any rate low-cost, city hospital.”

The sign gleamed. No matter what she said, Lady Sybil’s hands had remained perfectly steady. Rosie closed her mouth again. 

“Why are you doing all of this?” she said at last. “You could have been at your country house days ago.”

Lady Sybil got to her feet and dusted off her knees. She crossed the attic to a small round window, and took her wig off her head to scratch her cropped-short hair, which was still mostly a similar shade of chestnut to the wig. Rosie stared, and then got up and followed her over to the window.

It was a great view of the city. The fires, if Rosie was any judge, had spread. 

“It reminds me of the dragon,” Rosie said, several minutes later.

“I didn’t leave then,” Lady Sybil said distantly. 

She hadn’t, Rosie remembered. She had taken up a sword and charged the guards who came to take her to be eaten by a dragon. At least that was the story, which Rosie had once had trouble believing, but now found completely plausible. 

“I can’t leave Ankh-Morpork. It would be like leaving Sam. Out of the question.”

Rosie looked out of the window. That was Pseudopolis Yard burning, apparently unhindered by troll or golem officers, which meant the Watch were now fighting every man for himself. Or herself or themselves, as the case increasingly often was. Rosie looked back at Lady Sybil, and her heart ached for her.

Something tugged at Rosie’s attention, and she looked again, harder. Lady Sybil’s free hand, half shielded by her wig, now rested over her abdomen. She was a woman with a build best described as magnificent, and there was nothing there to see, but something about the way she was holding herself…

Rosie’s heart twitched. “ _Sybil_ ,” she said involuntarily, and Lady Sybil looked at her at once and very clearly knew she had seen.

“How far are you along?” Rosie said.

“Two months, I think,” Lady Sybil said. “Perhaps three. My monthly visitor ought to have shown up last week. And I feel - But…”

Rosie waited.

“We have had a lot of disappointments,” Lady Sybil said, with careful calm. “I haven’t even told Sam yet. After the third time…”

Rosie sank her teeth into her lower lip. “Do you want this baby? Knowing what’s going on out there? If Sam doesn’t come back?”

“More than anything,” Lady Sybil said, and gripped the windowsill hard. “I’ll think of a way to keep him safe. But it may not matter, Rosie - I’m bleeding.”

“That doesn’t always mean,” Rosie began, and then stopped. “Go to bed. I’ll send you Mossy. And if the baby sticks, I’ll help, and I won’t tell anyone.”

Rosie almost crossed her eyes to look at her own traitorous mouth. What _possessed_ her to promise that?

Lady Sybil was looking at her with surprise. “You mean it?”

“Well,” Rosie said, and gestured generally at the floor, meaning the impromptu hospital down below. “You did all this.”

“Thank you,” Lady Sybil said, still staring, and then there was a perfunctory knock and another woman let herself into the attic: tall, pretty in a severe sort of way, with white and black hair marshalled into a tight bun and an austere governess-like navy blue dress. “Susan! Do meet Mrs. Palm. Rosie, this is Susan, the Duchess of Sto Helit.”

Rosie curtsied, thrown into confusion. The Duchess bowed like a witch, from the waist.

“You have news,” Lady Sybil said, and Rosie could see a terrible fear in her face, hear it in her trembling upbeat voice.

“It’s not Sir Samuel,” Susan said. “Captain Carrot is gone, though.”

Rosie flinched like it was a body blow, and in a sense she felt it as one. Lady Sybil leaned hard against the wall. Captain Carrot had come to the city as a young man, but there was no Morporkian that didn’t know him and love him. He was objectively peculiar. But objective had nothing to do with love, as Lady Sybil was currently proving.

“Thank you for telling me,” Lady Sybil said steadily. “That poor young man. He was so brave. Sam thought very highly of him.”

“You had better go and sleep a little,” Rosie said. “Such a terrible shock. Your Grace, will you help Lady Sybil to her room?”

She went and found a couple of her stronger girls instead, and bullied them into getting the sign down from the attic without smudging it and having it hung on the gates, clearly lit by lanterns. Outside them, Scoone Avenue was eerily quiet. Inside, it was full of fear. But it was busy fear, at least, with quick hands and sharp minds at work.

When she bustled back in, Sandra came to her saying Mossy wanted help with something, and then she went to Mossy, and then to one of the kitchenmaids who was having hysterics, and then to supervise a gravedigging detail for a little boy with burns who hadn’t made it, and then to roll up her sleeves and get a batch of teas and bowls of hot soup out. Sandra came by and told her to sleep, but there was more to do, there was always more to do, and when Rosie laid herself down on a sofa for five minutes she had nightmares that pushed her back up again. The night vanished and the dawn came, and as morning struck and she swallowed coffee and fruit Rosie remembered that Lady Sybil hadn’t had anything to eat. She had the cook make up a tray, and took it up to Lady Sybil’s bedroom, where she found Susan Sto Helit paused and frozen on a high landing, a strange blue light in her absent brown eyes. Rosie gripped the banister to stop herself recoiling, and waited for the woman to blink and return to herself. When she did, she refocused on Rosie.

“Sir Samuel’s gone,” she said grimly.

Rosie swayed involuntarily, and gripped the banister even tighter. It was too well-polished to give her splinters. Ankh-Morpork without Sam Vimes. Ankh-Morpork without Carrot Ironfoundersson, without Vetinari, without the gods only knew how many good people, and many others who might not have been good but still deserved better… Ankh-Morpork without Sam Vimes.

We survived Snapcase and Winder and gods know what else. _We_. Words spoken by the living, because the dead were voiceless…

Rosie swallowed hard. “You know her better than I do. Do we tell her?”

“No. She’s a practical woman. She’ll want proof.” The duchess rolled up her sleeves. “She could use company, though.”

So Rosie went into the bedroom and helped Lady Sybil correct the proofs on _Diseases of the Dragon_ , second edition. 

And later, when a white-faced young dwarf came up through the cellars with a badge that belonged to Sam Vimes and a rosewood truncheon marked _Keeper of thee King’s Piece_ , Rosie sat and watched Lady Sybil sit up in bed and turn the badge over and over like it still had her husband’s touch on it, as well as his blood. 


	2. Corporal Angua's Transformation

Seven months after she had trotted onto a boat, Angua von Überwald trotted off a different one. The city she walked into was theoretically the same, but it seemed roughly as different as those two boats, and the difference between even a crowded diplomatic yacht and a tramp ship carrying passengers who had paid out life savings for their tiny squares of deck was enormous. On both Angua had had to masquerade as someone's loyal pet. But at least nobody was going to try to eat her on the yacht.

The passengers on the tramp ship were… hungry. Angua had heard the sailors joking about it with the scorn of people whose meals were guaranteed. They came from pacified parts of the Klatchian Empire, with the malnutrition and meagre personal possessions that implied, and they had nothing left, except the hope that in Ankh-Morpork they could make their fortunes. They were the kind of people who had drowned when their hoped-for land on Leshp sank, because they had no boats to run to*. Angua sympathised. She remembered entering the city gates with the same hope of a new life in mind. She had eaten a lot of strange things back then too. 

It would have been embarrassing and upsetting for all concerned had she healed and transformed mid-butchery, though. Angua butted reassuringly at the hand of the teenaged matriarch who relied on her for protection and comfort, now that the girl's parents were gone, and tried not to feel bad that she was going to abandon her. She couldn't continue to be Lila, the street dog who had burst out of nowhere and chased off the men who had been trying to take food, possessions and Noor's baby sister away from Noor and her remaining siblings. Angua was a person, and she had a job to do. Getting Noor and the kids safe to Ankh-Morpork was as much as she could manage… but she'd stick around long enough to get them to a safe lodging house as well. And then she had a job to do.

Ankh-Morpork smelled almost the same as ever on the surface, given the putrid Ankh and the tanneries and Harry King's little enterprises, but it felt different. To Angua's discerning nose and copper's senses, it was different. There was fear and sullen anger in the air as they walked off the docks towards the city, and there were too few trolls and dwarfs on the streets. None, in fact. There were no City Watch to be seen, only soldiers in Klatchian uniforms, and the shops' shutters were half-closed, like it was a derby day and the football match might roll down the street soon. A lot of windows were boarded up, and a lot of buildings had recently been burned and replaced: Angua could smell charcoal and see where repairs sat uneasily on the old fabric or where burned-out sites still stood untouched, like blacked-out teeth. Carpets were flying over Ankh-Morpork, which was nothing new except that there were twice as many than there had been before, and the guilds were flying flags from their guildhalls. A sort of twinned Ankh-Morpork and Klatch flag, and then… and then the personal flag of the Rust family.

What the _fuck_. 

The fur rose on the nape of Angua's neck, and she led the small party to the only safe place she could think of: Mrs. Cake's. The children pressed close around her, but they followed. They'd learned to trust her.

Mrs. Cake, a woman of great discretion as well as precognition, opened the door, looked down at Angua, and visibly swallowed a swear word, before looking smoothly back at Noor and her siblings. "Thank you for bringing my daughter's dog back," Mrs. Cake said. "So kind of you! We've been looking everywhere for Blitzen! Do come in and have a cup of tea."

_Blitzen_. Angua rolled her eyes.

"Um," Noor said, in slightly halting Morporkian that would improve when she was less nervous. (Angua had noticed the stares on the way here. Smelled the hostility. At least it was no worse here than in the more salubrious bits of the city.) "Our dog… is your daughter's dog? She brought us straight here."

"What a clever girl! Where did you find her?" Mrs. Cake ushered the four kids into her hall, occasionally pausing to coo at Angua, who tolerated it in silence. The kids didn't know Mrs. Cake and their Morporkian wasn't much good yet; they probably wouldn't realise that she was hamming it up worse than any Fool. "She's been missing for months! My poor Ludmilla broke her heart over it. There, and she's moved away to Pseudopolis and all, but I'm sure we can soon have them reunited."

"Found?" Noor said uncertainly, sounding adrift. "In Klatch. She found us. There were bad men…"

"Dear me," Mrs. Cake said automatically, manoeuvring them into the kitchen. "You must have been terrified! Ludmilla will be so proud of Blitzen."

Faisal, who was nine and too old for girly things like crying, sniffled unhappily. Angua leaned up to lick his cheek and make him laugh, then caught herself. That was a… a canine sort of thing to do. All right when you needed to pass as a dog, at the risk of being killed by the nearest Klatchian soldier, but less good when you needed to be human. And when Angua found Carrot and got her feet under her again she would need that. It was all very well being the wolf, but Angua had wanted her human shape desperately for months. It was a strange feeling: she'd always taken after her father in that sense. The Baron always felt the pull towards the wolf shape, and so did Angua. Like her mother, she had chosen to be human, though they went about it very different ways; it was something she wanted because her mind had decided. But now she craved hands, feet, a human mind, human _Carrot_ , warm arms and that strong smell of good soap and the first steady person in her life since… since…

Since Elsa, really, and Elsa was always someone Angua had to protect. Protecting Carrot would have been a completely useless endeavour.

Mrs. Cake sat the children down at the table and gave them strong tea and biscuits, talking all the time about Blitzen, and Ludmilla, and the weather, and how difficult it was to find a place to stay in Ankh-Morpork, and since they'd brought Blitzen back, she was sure she could find them some room, free for the first week at least, help them get on their feet - 

Angua laid her head on Faisal's knee. The girls had clustered, Noor with the toddler (known only as Bibi, but Angua was pretty sure that was a nickname) on her lap and Maryam clinging close to her, but Faisal was stubbornly alone. Stupid kid. Stupid kid who knew exactly how to scratch behind her ears, though.

Mrs. Cake prattled the children all the way into two rooms and a bath, and put Noor in charge of the kettle, saying she just needed to write a letter to Ludmilla. Then she hustled Angua into her own apartment, and closed the door carefully. 

"I'll keep my back turned, dear," she said. "Ludmilla's emergency dress is still on the bed post in her room."

Angua trotted gratefully through to Ludmilla's room, and turned to human so quickly she staggered for a moment. She stretched, fingertips brushing the ceiling, and then bent all the way to the floor, stretching her back out. Then she grabbed the dress, and pulled it over her head quickly, taking the opportunity to pull taut and release aching arm muscles and flex her feet. Feet, not paws. _Feet_.

Angua looked at them properly. Very grubby feet, too. She needed a wash as much as the kids did. Possibly more, given how hard Noor tried to keep them all out of the dirt. She needed food, too; she had been aware of the gnaw of hunger for weeks, had caught herself dreaming about taking the odd chunk out of just one bullying small-timer in a guard uniform or just one man leering too hard at the kids. It had been hard to refrain, but she had. She could see the cost in lost muscle and fat.

Angua walked back into the sitting room.

"Where the bloody hell have you been?" Evadne Cake demanded. "I was sure you were dead like all the rest of them! And you look like you've been thrown under a dunnykin cart!"

Angua's spine went cold from tailbone to skull. "All the rest of who?" she whispered, hearing her own voice croak.

Mrs. Cake sighed and pulled out a chair. "Sit down," she said, waving at it impatiently, and ripped a lacy curtain aside to show a small stove. She put a smaller kettle on, and got out two teacups and a very robust teapot. "You've missed a lot."

Angua sat down slowly, staring at Mrs. Cake. "Who's dead?" she said, and then repeated it. "Who's dead?"

"Well, just about all of them, love," Mrs. Cake said sadly. "Including your young man, too."

The cold spread from Angua's spine to fingers, toes, and heart, and with it a terrible lassitude came over her body. She couldn't go any further; she couldn't even sit up straight. With a kind of painful slowness she folded forward onto the table, dirty cheek against the doily cloth, eyes staring blankly at the opposite floral-patterned wall. The cloth under her face was rapidly soaking, which meant she must be crying.

"Oh there now, dear, there," Mrs. Cake clucked, sounding far more helpless and less strict than Angua had ever heard before. "There now."

The first real sob ripped its way out of Angua's chest like tearing silk.

When Angua had finished crying her cup of tea had gone cold; Mrs.. Cake made her a second and passed her an enormous handkerchief, watching her anxiously from across the table. Angua's head felt heavier than a cannonball and her sinuses ached. She wiped her face thoroughly, and tried to breathe.

"A cup of tea will do you good, dear," Mrs. Cake said wretchedly, balling up her own handkerchief and stuffing it tidily into her sleeve. "Oh, dear. Oh, I am sorry. I had my precognition switched off for that one. A cup of tea and a bath and I'll see if Ludmilla left some better clothes that'll fit you, although I don't think it would be wise for you to go out dressed like a woman right now…"

"So Ludmilla really has gone to Pseudopolis." Angua blew her nose.

"It seemed safest. You'll have noticed things have changed."

Angua leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for a second. Then she nodded. "I noticed. Mr. Vimes, then? He's dead, or in prison?"

"Dead, my dear, I'm afraid," Mrs. Cake sighed.

Angua breathed out hard and blew her nose. A stone ball of grief settled somewhere between her twelfth ribs; she felt like if she just turned her fingers to claws she could tear it out and cradle it in her palms. She nodded again. "I saw there were no coppers on the streets. Only soldiers. Mr. Vimes'd go spare. So they either killed him or locked him up, and there's no cell that would hold him. Not with the Watch and Lady Sybil on the other side."

Angua had come to the city after the dragon. But Carrot (the ball of grief crashed upwards in her chest and collided with her heart) had told her the stories. Lady Sybil chained to a rock, Mr. Vimes running to her rescue. It was hard to imagine until you'd seen them together, and then it was hard to imagine anything else. 

Mrs. Cake nodded, subdued. "They put his poor corpse on display to prove he was de-"

Angua ripped the handkerchief in half by accident. "What?"

"Not - on a pike," Mrs. Cake said, eyeing Angua carefully. Angua remembered that Ludmilla Cake had turned at fourteen: Mrs. Cake had raised a teenaged werewolf, so probably nothing Angua did would shock her too much. "Decently. On a bier. Clean clothes. But they didn't ought to have done it. Cruel, it was. Poor Lady Sybil. She dressed him in his good uniform and had the wizards keep him and Captain Carrot cold, and she sat by them all that first night - she's a real lady, I always said so -"

Mrs. Cake, to Angua's very nearly certain knowledge, had never said anything at all about Lady Sybil. She let that slide, and refocused. Of course if they'd displayed Commander Vimes they would have displayed Carrot too. Carrot was a leader, whatever path he took, and Angua was not stupid. She'd heard the rumours he was Ankh-Morpork's destined king. She thought they were likely true.

"Carrot too?" she said. "Are they still there?"

Mrs. Cake shook her head. "No. Klatchians buried them after a bit."

Angua blinked. "Here? In the city?" 

"Well, I don't know, girl, but yes, I suppose -"

The ball of grief, contrary to all the laws of physics and properties generally applying to stone, spasmed. "Carrot wanted to be buried at home! He was a dwarf! A dwarf goes back to the rock they were raised in! He wanted me to take him home. To Copperhead. I _promised_." 

"Did hear the lawn ornaments weren't thrilled about it," said Mrs. Cake, with her tact turned off as well as her precognition. "But there's no denying you see a lot less of them than you used to -"

"Who did it?" Angua said impatiently, cutting brutally across her. "What happened?"

"I'm sure I don't know," Mrs. Cake said, and then added uncertainly: "I heard… I heard it was in Sheer Street. The Klatchians torched the city, you see. Ha, they didn't do well over _this_ side. But I heard Captain Carrot was trying to get to the river gates to flood the city, and old Stoneface, they say he was fighting street to street down near Cockbill, but I don't know I believe -"

"That sounds right," Angua said, hearing her voice like it was coming from far away. The ball of grief had sunk deep into her guts now. "Mr. Vimes grew up on Cockbill Street."

"Well, now. You'd think he could have thought of his good lady and lived. And Captain Carrot, too, you'd think he could have spared a thought."

"That's not how it works," Angua said distantly. "Ask Lady Sybil. She understands."

"Be sensible, Angua. What would I be doing talking to somebody like that. And anyway, how do you know -"

"I just do." Angua pressed the handkerchief hard to her face, which was aching. "I just do," she repeated, muffled, and then lowered the handkerchief and folded its two halves meticulously. "It was the Klatchians?"

"No doubt about that, with all the arrow wounds."

Angua breathed in and out. "Right," she said calmly. "Right. I am going to _find_ them and -"

Angua rose. Her human knees buckled. She sat down again very slowly.

"You're going to have a bath and a nap is what you are," Mrs. Cake said, tutting. "The state of you, corporal."

_Corporal_ , some part of Angua thought, even as a different part of her was recoiling from the whole concept of the b-word. _Corporal Angua_.

_You have a job to do and it's not called vengeance. That's not what a copper's **for**. That's not what a copper **does**._

"Look after the kids," she said, into the doily on top of the table. "They kept me human."

"Oh dear," Mrs. Cake sighed, for about the fifteenth time, as Angua slid from the chair onto the floor, and fell asleep there. She rubbed her chin and sighed again. "And on the good carpet, too."

Some hours later - clean, dry, and with a meal in her belly, the children reassured by her presence and comforted by an old iconograph of Angua in wolf form with Ludmilla Cake in the background - darkness fell. And Angua went to the Dwarf Bread Museum. 

Mrs. Cake had warned her there was a curfew. Apparently the Klatchians had tried to halt a football match a few weeks ago, considering it a cover for unrest and seditious elements, and there'd been riots. Vetinari wouldn't have been such a fool, but the new Patrician - not the Patrician at all, Mrs. Cake had said; a Governor, a son of the Rust family - was stupid enough to have ordered it done. Angua reserved judgement over whether he actually had given the order, though having been in the same room as enough Rusts to last a lifetime she was sure he was perfectly comfortable with it. The Klatchians had an Ankh-Morporkian mouthpiece. The words were their own affair. And in this case the words were an eight o'clock curfew in Morpork, except for selected workers who had passes for dawn work. Naturally it didn't apply on the Ankh side of the river - or perhaps didn't apply to the correct people in the correct streets. Angua could smell dirty policing when it was right under her nose. And she could practically see Commander Vimes chewing his cigar with rage.

Angua changed reluctantly into the wolf, and trotted out into Ankh-Morpork. She paused at the end of Mrs. Cake's street, and settled her paws onto the cobbles, sniffed the air until she had a perfect, grounding map of where she was. The Shades had not been much burned, probably because the men with the matches hadn't got very far before being mugged for their boots, uniforms and weapons, but they'd been rebuilt even less than the rest of the city, and the smell of charcoal underlaid the usual stink more heavily here than elsewhere. The wolf part of Angua was already getting used to the smoke.

The non-human inhabitants of Ankh-Morpork said the curfew largely applied to the living, and that someone passing for a dog might go unnoticed. Mrs. Cake said that most people thought Angua was dead, if they thought of her at all. Angua thought that a man like 71-Hour Ahmed, who had known she was a werewolf well enough to chain her with silver, probably hadn't assumed she was dead. And he had been a pupil at the Assassins' Guild; Cadram couldn't have many better options for a deputy in Ankh-Morpork, the kind of deputy that could have committed the murder of Snowy Slopes. Angua shared Commander Vimes' scepticism about that whole case - she already knew it was one she'd never be able to set aside as unsolved and move on, though the trail seemed to have gone cold - but there was no denying that 71-Hour Ahmed was ruthless, capable, and a source of terror to his fellow Klatchians. Combine that with his knowledge of Ankh-Morpork… If some hapless guard reported a pale Ramtops wolfhound wandering through the streets, he would quickly put the pieces together and start the hunt. Angua did not enjoy being hunted. 

She looked pretty grubby still, at least, thin and fierce, like a street dog. Hopefully not too many of the guards knew what a Ramtops wolfhound looked like, or harboured suspicions as to why a street dog would be so big and strong. And she could lean on the fact that most of the streetlights were out, in places where there even were streetlights: these were usually maintained by local shopkeepers, who saw no use in keeping them up when there was no-one to be enticed into their shops. Angua slipped from shadow to shadow, passing rapidly before the Governor's Palace - brightly lit with audible laughter and music, as men and women disembarked from gilded carriages; Vetinari had kept the official entertaining to a minimum, but it looked like Gravid Rust liked to party - and disappearing towards the darker, quieter streets favoured by the dwarfish community.

The Dwarf Bread Museum hadn't changed much since the days of the golem. It was slightly better kept up now, thanks to a guilty community, and the displays were a bit more innovative than they had been when Carrot had brought her here on one of his more baffling dates. But from the second Angua approached the shopfront she could smell it: armour polish, an obscure dwarven brand from Copperhead, good plain soap, and some other indefinable element she associated with earnestness and being a bloody pigheaded honourable fool. Overlaying those faint smells were the scent of good candles, new-baked dwarf bread, more Morporkian polish, and many dwarves and a few humans who'd been in and out, but that matrix of Carrot smells seized control of Angua's heart and nearly dragged her through the shop window paws-first. She wrestled with her human half and tried not to whine too loudly, then hauled herself around the corner into a back street where she knew of a delivery gate next door that didn't shut right.

It was quite hard to get into the Dwarf Bread Museum, even with human fingers, from the back. Security seemed to have been beefed up a little, though not so much that the door failed to respond to a supernaturally enhanced kick; Angua hobbled through the now loose door, naked and swearing, and availed herself of a tablecloth that wouldn't be clean when she took it off again. She probably needed another good wash or two - in a shower, if she could manage it - to deal with the ingrained dirt.

There was a safety lamp burning in another room, one of the deep-down ones that could be left for days at a time if necessary. Carrot had shown Angua one before, and she recognised the strange steady quality of the light and distinctive smell of its fuel. It was in a side room, and probably no-one with human-standard vision would have noticed it, especially if the unusually well-made door hadn't been open a crack. Angua listened carefully, and assured herself there was nothing living and sentient in the museum itself; then she opened the door and realised that it led to a staircase. A narrow one.

Angua tied the tablecloth into a robust sarong and went and fetched the duty battle baguette from behind the cash register. It was almost never used, Carrot had explained to her, except for show; the one time a pair of unlicensed Thieves had come to hold the place up, the Thieves had chased them down before the museum attendant, a bored teenager, had had time to do more than lift the baguette aloft and yell _TODAY IS A GOOD DAY FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO DIE_. But it was certainly tough enough to do the job. Angua tapped it against her leg experimentally and found the crust was as hard as concrete.

She pushed the door open with a fingertip. It led to a stairwell. The light grew greater down below. 

Angua took a solid grip on the battle baguette and stepped down onto the staircase.

The stairs went down only one flight, but it was steep. Angua trod carefully, towards the edges of the stairs, where they were less likely to creak. The Dwarf Bread Museum had no cellar: this was most likely newly dug.

At the bottom was another door, locked, but on the other side Angua smelled a dwarf. She leaned against the wall for a while, and listened and smelled.

A single axe; a small one. A young dwarf, somehow familiar, but through Carrot Angua had met half the dwarfish community. Uncertain, and sad, and frightened. All that Angua could understand. Unaware, too. She was sure the dwarf couldn't help that.

Angua whacked the lock off the door and stepped into Carrot's tomb - a plain room with a bier and two wobbly chairs. The dwarf sitting on one yelped and leaped to their feet, brandishing their axe.

"Stop yelling, I'm here to - _Constable Stronginthearm_?"

"Corporal Angua?" squeaked the unfortunate constable, falling over both their own feet, the chair they had been sitting on, and the traditional axe.

"That's my name. Don't wear it out." Angua's eyes were drawn to the bier in the centre of the room.

It was more of a table really. But whatever it was, it was well made, and Carrot's helmet, greaves, and sword had been laid out on it. Angua assumed the Klatchians had taken the rest. The safety lamp whose light she had discerned had been hung from the ceiling. The walls were covered in writing, much of it in dwarfish runes; Angua remembered the golem king, and hoped she was in time.

She laid her hand on the table. Good wood, no splinters.

"We thought you were dead," said Constable Stronginthearm, timidly. 

"No," Angua said quietly, her fingers resting on the hilt of Carrot's sword. If she worked hard she could remember his hands. "Followed a lead to Klatch. No-one came after me. I didn't know you'd been invaded."

"Oh," said Constable Stronginthearm, quite softly. "Oh."

The sword felt wrong. Angua dragged over the second rickety chair and laid her hand on the top of Carrot's helmet instead. "Report, constable," she said, and Constable Stronginthearm told her everything she knew.

Commander Vimes hadn't set out to fight for the city so much as he'd set out to keep it in one piece. Rust was so overconfident he had left Ankh-Morpork almost completely undefended, except for the Watchmen, who had been - briefly - Sir Samuel's First of Foot. But no-one called them that, Constable Stronginthearm assured Angua nervously, everyone just said The Watch. They were there to keep the peace. Or at least to keep as many people as possible from getting hurt. But whoever the Klatchians had sent hadn't got the memo about reasonable treatment of a civilian population, and Commander Vimes, being Commander Vimes, had been ready for that. The Watch had fought the fires and the Klatchians and arrested entire companies of men (before leading them a merry dance and dumping them in the river when the Klatchians, for some odd reason probably connected to their immense superiority of numbers, refused to come quietly). Constable Stronginthearm waxed indignant about the burning and the killing for several minutes, and speculated that it was a special kind of revenge, because plucky Ankh-Morpork had dared to challenge them.

Angua could practically see Carrot's mild look, hear Commander Vimes' explosive snort.

"No," she said. "That's not special. Prince Cadram is bringing his Empire into the Century of the Fruitbat. All the bits of it that liked where they were get… pacified. And that's how they do the pacifying."

"Oh." 

"And we didn't dare to challenge them," Angua added. "We got into a bunfight over a bit of rock that's sunk back into the sea where it came from, and we lost."

"Oh," Constable Stronginthearm repeated uncertainly.

"Tell me about the Watch," Angua said.

The Watch had not fared well. Officially disbanded before the Klatchians set foot on Ankh-Morporkian soil, deprived of their commanders by the fighting, half the Watchhouses burned - including Pseudopolis Yard, which Angua had seen as a tumbledown semi-skeleton roughly cordoned off and cried for - they had tried to collect, and been gently dispersed. Implicit in the promise of the gentle dispersing was some very ungentle dispersing. There was therefore no-one to stop the regular riots. In any case, Klatchian law now applied, and was enforced by Prince Cadram's men headed by someone called 71-Hour Ahmed, in the name of the Governor Gravid Rust. They said Mr Boggis of the Thieves' Guild had spent half an hour alone with 71-Hour Ahmed and had come out pale and gibbering: now unlicensed thieves were handed over to the Tanty, rather than dealt with by the Guild. 

The change was going down particularly badly with businesspeople who didn't want to stick to a curfew, garden-variety Ankh-Morpork gossips who had never met a libel or a lèse-majesté law in their lives and didn't want to start now, and shopkeepers who now had robust food standards to adhere to. It had gone somewhat worse with dwarves, trolls and the Ankh-Morporkian undead, who did not feature heavily in Klatchian perspectives. Most trolls had left the city, due to being classified as sub-human, and also due to a short-lived mob war when certain incoming business interests had crashed headfirst into those of Chrysoprase and the Breccia. A lot of guilty trolls had died, yes, but a lot of innocent ones too, along with their human neighbours. Detritus might once have intervened, and probably been killed for his trouble, but he’d died in Sator Square during the sack of the city and his widow Ruby had gone north. Without the underground ways and means the dwarves possessed, the trolls were even more vulnerable than the dwarves, and the Klatchians controlling the city had allowed themselves to be guided by the disdain shown by Governor Rust and men like him. 

Angua picked up Carrot's helmet and stared at her grim reflection. Whoever was in charge here kept it well-polished. Constable Stronginthearm eyed her nervously, and continued.

The dwarves had gone underground: they were the only ones maintaining the Watch's law, at least below ground, by virtue of a secret Watchhouse under what had been the Treacle Mine Road Watchhouse before a dragon had flambéd it. The Klatchians did not like that much, especially since they couldn't find the Watchhouse. They believed in law that went all the way to the bottom, even if (going by the swank on some of the posher streets) it didn't get all the way to the top. There had been several major incidents, some of which had proved that Klatchians did not know how to fight underground, and some of which proved that they were fast learners. There was an ongoing legal battle over whether dwarven marriage payments should be classified as illegal dowries, which was probably the most physically harmless of the disputes - and certainly cheaper than the heavier taxes levied on dwarves, allegedly at the recommendation of Governor Rust, who had said those little buggers always had extra cash - but the one that caused the greatest resentment. 

That and the treatment of Carrot Ironfoundersson's body.

"They said he wasn't a dwarf!" Constable Stronginthearm squeaked, on the verge of tears.

"A lot of people said that when he was alive," Angua pointed out. Her own eyes seemed to have dried out permanently.

"Yes, but now everyone knows they were wrong!"

Do they, Angua thought.

"Where's Vetinari?"

"Nobody knows," Constable Stronginthearm said. "He's vanished. He might be dead?" she added doubtfully.

"Hm," Angua said. "What about Watch leadership? We've lost -" she swallowed hard, and forced her voice level - "Carrot, and Commander Vimes, and Detritus. Where's Cheery?"

"Um, she's gone too," said Constable Stronginthearm.

Angua shut her eyes.

"She, um. She blew a lot of people up. Their side, not ours. It got her too."

There was a long pause.

"It was a massive bang. Not an accident, either. The Alchemists' Guild re-awarded her membership. Um, posthumously."

Angua had seen Cheery do the alchemists' double forward somersault behind the largest item of furniture enough times that she could imagine the scene. "I bet," she said, in a voice that was smaller than she wanted it to be. "I bet… it was very impressive." She took a deep breath. "Now tell me about Carrot. I know how he died." Angua fought off a mental image of Carrot, surrounded, wounded, peppered with arrows, going down fighting, never quite hopeless, leaning hard on the million to one chance… "Tell me what happened afterwards."

"Um."

"Constable." A bit of NCO snap got back into Angua's voice, and she seized on it as a relief. "It's not a difficult question. We're sitting in a shrine, for gods' sakes. _How did it get here_?"

"Um," Constable Stronginthearm said. "I think you'd better talk to Constable Haddock… and Grag Bashfulsson."

"Haddock?" Angua lifted her gaze from the helmet at last. "And who the hell is Bashfulsson?"

"He's sort of," Constable Stronginthearm said helplessly. "He's sort of… well…"

Grag Bashfulsson was a dwarf who carried himself without pretension or ostentation. He wore such light armour, and kept his weaponry so simple, it was almost cause for surprise - especially now when every dwarf Angua had seen moved quickly and bristled with a visible armoury. He didn't even carry an axe, but he walked like the Patrician did, and carried authority over his shoulders. He, like Constable Haddock, had a forgettable face; unlike Constable Haddock he very deliberately wasn't a forgettable person. And the constables were deferring to him. And unlike nobody else Angua had met thus far in the city, he didn't smell of fear. Even Constable Haddock - dressed like a nondescript civilian - echoed with it, just slightly.

She got to her feet, and greeted the grag in clumsy, rusty dwarfish, trying not to stare pointedly over his shoulder at Haddock, in some kind of watchman’s reflex that didn't apply to her language skills. It was hard without Carrot to practise with. 

He bowed his head to her with respect. "I'm sorry for your loss."

Angua's throat hurt, and the ball of misery beat steadily against her ribs. She was beginning to think it might be her heart. She inclined her head clumsily.

"We believed you were dead. If we'd known you were in the city, this would have been more kindly done."

Angua swallowed hard, and pushed away memories of the long desert nights trailing Ahmed and Khufurah, hoping desperately that Carrot had alerted Commander Vimes and they were right behind her, the dreadful realisation that it was all for nothing and the war was lost, the long and painful journey back to Ankh-Morpork, the fresh wound where Carrot should be. When she felt herself back in the present day, she realised a long and awkward pause was still hanging in midair.

"Thanks," she said belatedly. "But I don't think there's anything that could have made this easier to bear." Her eyes drifted to Carrot's helmet again. "I wish I'd never gone."

"Commander Vimes said if anyone would solve the case it was you," Constable Haddock offered, subdued.

She could hear him saying it, too. "Thanks. But I didn't."

Angua wanted to say that it didn’t matter now, but of course it did. The attempted murder of Prince Khufurah of Klatch was tangled up in this whole sorry tale as surely as the appearance (and subsequent disappearance) of Leshp, and only one of those things had been a natural phenomenon. If Ankh-Morpork was ever going to be free to make its own mistakes again, someone needed to get their hands on the person who’d tried to kill Prince Khufurah and drag him out into the light.

“Say rather you haven’t yet,” suggested Grag Bashfulsson. He nodded to Constable Haddock, who was carrying a heavy bag that clinked. Angua was too miserable to do anything but hope it wasn’t silver. “Although the invading forces took Captain Ironfoundersson’s body from us before we were able to do more than perform the initial rituals, we were able to clean him decently… and to check his pockets and his lodgings. We believe these are yours.”

Angua stared at him, and then took the bag from Haddock.

On top of the pile of miscellaneous clothing, armour and weaponry, Angua found a small cloth drawstring bag. Inside was her badge on its collar, and a pair of crumpled and worn iconographs. One of Carrot, deep in thought, holding one of the pocket-sized monuments of Ankh-Morpork in the scarred palm he had once thrown between her and a silver-tipped crossbow bolt. A second - this one much more pristine - was an awkward image of her, badly composed, sitting on the parapet of the Brass Bridge and smiling in the sunlight in the fixed kind of way that people do when the man with the iconograph is taking forever to get it right. Carrot had been so determined to get it right. It was an awful picture.

“The iconographs were tucked into his helmet,” Grag Bashfulsson said quietly. “The badge, we found in his pocket.”

And you had a good go at cleaning the blood off the leather, didn’t you, Angua thought. The stains were now barely visible, but she knew they were there. She could smell them.

She buckled the collar around her throat nonetheless, and lifted the bag of clothes with a grunt. “Excuse me while I change,” she said, and went into the next room without bothering to wait for an answer. 

Dressing helped. She’d noticed it when she first put clothes back on at Mrs. Cake’s - the way clothes changed the way you moved reminded you how to be a human. Wearing her own, which still smelled like her even after months, was infinitely better. It was obvious that after her unscheduled departure Carrot had taken her armour home and cleaned it himself: it smelled like his polish, and had been touched up with the same brand by someone else, most likely Constable Stronginthearm. The familiar weight of the breastplate across her shoulders, the familiar press of the helmet on her head. (She tucked both iconographs into the inside rim.) There was no comb or brush in the bag, but there was a hairtie. Angua braided her hair. The repetitive movements were second nature, and more than second nature; they let her think clearly.

The badge pressed against her neck just the way she remembered, and the case - the case, Angua thought, finally able to set her grief aside for even one more moment - was still unsolved. Worse than that, there might be law on the streets of Ankh-Morpork, but there wasn’t any justice.

She went back into Carrot’s shrine. “This should be private,” she said, to the grag and the Watchmen waiting respectfully for her. “Let Carrot rest, for the gods’ sake. He died for us. Let him sleep.”

Constable Stronginthearm flinched, but she didn’t argue.

“We cannot keep everyone out,” Grag Bashfulsson said slowly, “and it gives people hope to remember him. He was the best of the city. But we can restrict access, and encourage people to think of him… as what they might be on their best days, rather than as a…”

“Saviour,” Angua said flatly, having had time to read some of the runes on the wall. “He’s not coming back.” A wave of dizziness overtook her: she softened her knees and pressed her feet into the soles of her boots until it passed. “He’s not coming back,” she repeated. “All we can do is save ourselves, and remember him.”

The others nodded. 

“Thank you for doing what you could for him,” Angua said. Her eyes fell on the helmet again. “I should have been here.” 

“He always used to say the city was the important thing,” Constable Stronginthearm offered rather tentatively. “You tried to save the city. He would have understood.”

“Yes,” Angua said. “But that doesn’t change what I said.” She took up Carrot’s sword, and looked at her reflection in the blade without seeing anything. The grip was too large for her hand - she was tall, and had broad-palmed, long-fingered hands, but Carrot was taller, and the sword had always been the perfect fit for him - but the blade was sharp, and well-kept. It was wrong for the job, though, and it wasn’t hers. She laid it down again, and looked at Constable Stronginthearm and Constable Haddock.

“Are there any other senior officers left alive?” she said.

Constable Stronginthearm looked at Constable Haddock, who shook his head slowly. “Nobody above the rank of Corporal… and nobody wanted to take a, uh, a field promotion.” 

“Nobody?” Angua said, startled despite herself. “Not even Sergeant Colon?”  
  
“Went missing just before the invasion,” Constable Haddock said, and then frowned. “Same time as Lord Vetinari. He was last seen with Nobby, down by the docks.”

Angua frowned. “And he’s not been back?”

Constable Haddock shook his head wordlessly. “Everyone knows Fred Colon. If someone’d seen him I’d have found out.”

“Ha,” Angua said. “And I just bet everyone knows you too, Haddock, if not under the same name? The Watch seems to me like it’s still well-informed.”  
  


Haddock looked at the triangle of skin between her eyebrows when he demurred, and presumably he thought she couldn’t tell he wasn’t looking him in the eye. 

“Bullshit,” Angua informed him succinctly. “You’re promoted to Corporal.”

Haddock winced. Angua ignored that.

“I want to see the Watchhouse,” Angua said. She knew it wouldn’t be far from here: the dwarfs didn’t occupy a specific neighbourhood, as such, but they often settled near each other, and the Dwarf Bread Museum and Treacle Mine Road were close to each other. “See who’s left. And then we’re going to solve the case. It’s at the bottom of all of this - I know it is.”  
  


“Um,” said Constable Stronginthearm, who was going to need to grow out of that habit. “We might have a lead there.”

“Good,” Angua said. “Tell me about it.”

Both constables looked at Grag Bashfulsson. Angua, who was beginning to think that she knew a political operative when she smelled one, felt her eyes narrow.

“I don’t suppose you’ve had time to hear about the Lady Sybil Emergency Hospital,” Grag Bashfulsson said. 

“No,” Angua said.

“Perhaps we can tell you on the way to the Watchhouse.”

  
It took twenty minutes’ brisk walking up and down through formerly abandoned cellars, ancient attics, and old boxrooms - all carefully propped and drained - to get to Treacle Mine Road Two, and it took just about that long to explain what had happened to Lady Sybil. Angua had got the impression that it had been really unpleasant from the little Mrs.. Cake had said about her sitting vigil beside Commander Vimes’ and Carrot’s bodies, but she had failed to realise exactly how narrow Mrs.. Cake’s information was, and she had forgotten that Lady Sybil had a spine made of the best dwarf steel available. 

Lady Sybil, said Constable Haddock - who Mr Vimes had posted to keep Lady Sybil informed and the Scoone Avenue house safe - had reacted to the invasion by gathering civilians and decent doctors under her roof, and declaring her home a hospital. The Klatchians had visited, apparently intending to turn it into a billet, but Mossy Lawn (“the _pox doctor_?” “He does surgery too - he’s damn good”) and the Igors and the witches had put on a terrifying show of Ankh-Morporkian medicine, and Lady Sybil herself had fended them off with iron grace. Now absolutely no Klatchian would go anywhere near the place. They had their own medical facilities, in the Governor’s Palace, and they didn’t know a damn thing about the food that was redirected from Lady Sybil’s kitchens to the plates of hungry people, or the information that passed from patient to nurse, or the money that hopped, skipped and jumped through the hospital’s accounts and came out one end looking very different from the way it had to begin with. They suspected, yes, but they didn’t know. 

Everyone had been a bit worried, put in Constable Stronginthearm, when Lady Sybil left Ankh-Morpork and went to Crundells in the countryside, because that meant Mrs. Palm was in charge -

Angua stopped in her tracks and turned to face Constable Stronginthearm.

\- yes, Constable Stronginthearm said, correctly interpreting Angua’s expression, and there was another candidate for swift promotion if ever Angua saw one, _Rosie_ _Palm_. It had looked for a while like the Klatchians might not respect her being in charge the way they’d respected Lady Sybil, but luckily, they were wrong…

Both ladies, Grag Bashfulsson suggested, were very good at being underestimated.

Angua considered this, decided that it rang more than true, and started walking again. Mrs. Palm entering into alliance with Lady Sybil was odd, but it was far from the strangest thing she’d heard today. 

“Lady Sybil knew Lord Vetinari,” she said, “when they were just a pair of posh kids. I wonder if she’s got an idea where he’s gone to.”  
  


“I don’t know,” Constable Stronginthearm said, “but I do know the Dearhearts, up at the clacks, John Dearheart got told he had to give copies of all Lady Sybil’s clackses to the Klatchians and he... had an accident.”

“Oh yes.” Angua made an educated guess. “Fell off a tower?”

“However did you know,” said Constable Haddock, very flatly. Definitely ripe for promotion.  
  


“So now his sister _does_ give the Klatchians copies of the clacks messages, at least the plain readouts without any of the supporting code, but I’ve seen them, and I am pretty sure they aren’t just what they say they are, you know,” Constable Stronginthearm disclosed, in a rush. “You’d need to know a lot about clacks coding, and have a pretty in-depth knowledge of dwarven literature, but -”

“Does Lady Sybil have an in-depth knowledge of dwarven literature?” Angua broke in. She would be surprised to hear it, but hell, again, it wouldn’t be the most surprising thing that had happened today. “I thought she mostly studied dragons?”

Grag Bashfulsson coughed. “A great deal of dwarven literature is heavily related to dragons. As a matter of fact, Lady Sybil speaks excellent conversational dwarfish, and is very well-educated on many matters of dwarven culture… unlike the present administration.”  
  


Angua eyed the top of his helmet narrowly. “Which is why you’re down here, rather than up there, treating with the Governor.”  
  
“After the egregious mistreatment of dwarven Ankh-Morporkian citizens, and the rupture of several key trade treaties, the Low King broke off diplomatic relations with Governor Rust, and through him Prince Cadram.”  
  


Angua and Haddock ducked to avoid banging their heads on a low doorjamb. Grag Bashfulsson had certainly given her an answer, and it was perhaps halfway connected to the one she was expecting. Besides, she had learned several useful things over the last twenty minutes, and one of them had been a firm reminder that - while she had been far away - nothing in her absence had stood still.

“She’s also quite the committed correspondent, isn’t she, Grag Bashfulsson?” Angua said. The stone ball that had been floating quietly around her midsection for a whole half an hour, temporarily distracted, tangled itself lovingly in her intestines. She had never spent much time with Lady Sybil, nor had she ever seen her write a letter, but she remembered Lady Sybil making polite conversation about letter-writing with Carrot (who wrote home twice a week, without fail). And further back, distant in the memory, she remembered her mother sneering at another pink sheet of scented notepaper from _Sybbie Ramkin, that silly big girl who never grew up_. It looked as if Sybbie Ramkin had grown up hard and fast, and that the Klatchians and the Rusts weren’t the only ones underestimating her.

Grag Bashfulsson was audibly mulling over his words. Constable Haddock and Constable Stronginthearm were eavesdropping so hard that their lobes were fit to fall off.

“I personally haven’t had the pleasure,” Grag Bashfulsson said finally. 

Ah, well, Angua thought, listening to what he wasn’t saying. Technically true, at least. 

“Any of you seen her since Mr Vimes died?” she said. “How is she?”  
  


There was a sudden silence.

  
“I took her the commander’s truncheon,” Constable Stronginthearm said, in a very small voice. “She was… she was…”

Stronginthearm’s voice trailed off into nothing. Angua realised that question had been more unkind than she had thought, and reached down to squeeze the dwarf’s shoulder. “It was well done,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me anything more about that. Haddock? If Mr Vimes ordered you to watch over Lady Sybil, you can’t tell me you stopped.”

“She’s… I last saw her a couple of weeks before she went to Crundells,” Constable Haddock said. “She’d been… not well. She was… struggling, I think.”

The stone ball in Angua’s chest throbbed in recognition, like a wound that needed to be dipped in salt water and kept there for safekeeping, until infection fled. “Poor woman,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Constable Haddock said. “I feel bad for her, but… I’d be scared to pity her. You’d have to be very brave, or very stupid, to pity her.”  
  
And that was interesting, but then they turned a corner and gave a countersign, and they were in the Watchhouse.

Treacle Mine Road Two had very obviously been built by dwarves, with some minor accommodations for humans and trolls. You could tell by the way the separated changing rooms were an afterthought, and by the size of most of the doorways and chairs. It had also been built by very cautious people. You could tell that by the sheer number of booby traps and blind corridors on the way in.

Mr. Vimes, Angua couldn’t help feeling, would have approved.

It was now the middle of the night, so most Watchmen - that is, those that were left - were out patrolling. The old routes no longer applied, of course, and no-one was in uniform, but there was still some justice being handed out, in some ways. Most Watchmen didn’t even carry a badge; there was a numbered and named rack up against one wall with badges hanging from it, and Haddock explained that being caught with a Watch badge on you was now a hanging offence, since they’d been declared a seditious organisation. The plot to assassinate Governor Rust hadn’t been a false one, but the connection to the Watch had been made up out of whole cloth and scorpion-pit confessions. It had still been a convenient excuse.

The few that were there were stunned to see Angua, and Angua had to repeat the story of her time in Klatch several times before she could get them to settle down and tell her anything useful about what had been happening here. Her incredibly limited evidence about the attempted murder of Prince Khufurah was added to a situation board and considered from every possible angle, and they collectively decided that it best supported the theory that Prince Cadram had intended to use his brother’s visit to Ankh-Morpork as a convenient stalking horse for some dynastic pruning, with the happy side-effect of being able to leverage it against Ankh-Morpork. When he’d been able to take the whole city, that was probably just a bonus. They were probably making him money hand over fist.

“We’re costing him, too,” Angua said, eyeing up the map of Ankh-Morpork which occupied one entire wall, and showed where arrests had been interrupted, supplies had been mysteriously vanished, privies backed up to render collection offices useless, and unlawfully collected taxes quietly disappeared. Nothing, strictly speaking, outside the bounds of Ankh-Morpork law. Though Angua could see them slipping, and wondered how long they'd be able to stick to the law. “All to the good. Let’s keep bleeding him. But no unnecessary risks, all right? The butcher’s bill is already too long.”  
  
There was a chorus of _Yes, Commander_ that made her faintly dizzy. 

“I don’t think we _are_ making him money,” said a short, colourless man with the air of a clerk. Constable Stronginthearm had introduced him as Constable Pessimal, who had been fished out of the burning Palace by Constable Dorfl and taken into Watch custody. He’d since found another job at the Bank, and was now one of their most dedicated informers. “I can’t read Klatchian, but looking at the numbers, it seems as if, ultimately, the occupation is _losing_ him money. The regulations he set up and the attempts to tighten his control of the city are killing trade.”  
  


“If he’s fucking up, let’s not interrupt him,” Angua said. She stretched out her back and sighed. She’d already handed out a number of field promotions, to restore a normal chain of command to the attenuated Watch. A lot of the candidates she’d once had her eye on were gone - and that ached, too - but a number of others had stepped up and shown unanticipated leadership skills.

She caught Grag Bashfulsson’s eye. The grag had retired into the background, but he was still there… and pretty much still unnoticed, which spoke volumes for how demoralised and broken down this version of the Watch was. One day, Angua would see to it, they’d have Pseudopolis Yard back, and when they did, she would be pleased to give Grag Bashfulsson a tour of the public areas. And then usher him straight back out the front door. 

“I have a lead on Vetinari,” she said at last, “and on getting something that we can nail Prince Cadram and Governor Rust on, and get our godsdamned city back. I’ll be reporting back regularly… likely to Sergeant Haddock or Corporal Shoe, but we’ll see what lines of communication I can manage.”  
  
For some reason Haddock looked less unnerved by this than he had been by his earlier surprise promotion.

Angua slipped her hand into her pocket and curled it tightly around the other badge that had been in Haddock’s bag. Carrot’s.

“Be good while I’m gone,” she said. “And if you can’t be good, be clever.” 

Getting out of Ankh-Morpork was not straightforward. For one, she had to give up her armour again - though not her badge, or Carrot’s, or the iconographs - and for another she had to figure out a way to leave without breaking the children’s hearts. Sergeant Haddock and Constable Stronginthearm volunteered.

Constable Stronginthearm led the way to her room, a well-hidden lodging somewhere under Shamlegger Street, where Angua was able to change and pack her things away and where Constable Stronginthearm surprised her by producing one of the emergency bags she’d stashed around town - one she’d left with Cheery. It had been labelled _Angua_ in Cheery’s neat handwriting - like most alchemists with lengthy careers, Cheery labelled everything that didn’t move and some things that did - so it probably wasn’t a surprise that Constable Stronginthearm had known who to keep it for.

Angua raised her eyebrows. 

“Um,” Constable Stronginthearm said. “I thought they would probably strip out Cheery’s lodging too, so I, um, got there first.”

“Thank you,” Angua said. “We were friends.”

“I know. Commander. Ma’am.”

Angua was going to have to get used to that. She checked the contents of the bag - all still there - and slipped the badges and iconographs inside. “Did you send her home?”

“Um… Yes, eventually. We had to check her parents would bury her as - as a her, first.”

Angua closed the bag carefully. “I hope they did.”

“Yes. Yes. Um, I think the gold from the Low King for her burial helped. Because she was a… distinguished citizen.”

Angua wondered if the stone ball in her chest would ever get any smaller. “Well, she deserved to be honoured.”

“She was very important,” Constable Stronginthearm said, to the toes of her boots. “To us. The, uh, the other female dwarves.”

The stone ball was twisting idly, like it had nothing better to do, bruising Angua's heart and lungs. “She was very brave.”

Constable Stronginthearm nodded.

"Turn around while I change, would you?"

It was harder to get back to Mrs. Cake's. She was tired, and it was almost dawn, and carrying such precious cargo - she had refused to let the now rather full emergency bag go, even though she would see Haddock tomorrow and it was the only logical thing to do - was nervewracking. Angua hadn't thought she had that many nerves left, but that had been when she still had Carrot.

She slept in human form, in Ludmilla Cake's bed, and spent the morning saying goodbye to the children. Faisal refused even to look at her now he knew she was going, determinedly saying that she was only a dog after all, and Noor made him hold Bibi, who was too small to understand what was going on. Maryam cried, which was hard to watch; even Mrs. Cake's eyes glimmered, and she turned aside and blew her nose very loudly. Noor just clung to Angua, whispering, and Angua had to pretend she couldn't hear.

The kids would be all right. Mrs. Cake would take care of them, paid for by the emergency money that had been under Angua's mattress (she'd always known a thing or two about leaving in a hurry). And Angua had been lying to them without words for months: her presence wasn't good for them, not really. But it still hurt to leave them.

Haddock, looking like a dockworker - Angua wondered if he had the matching forged pass - came to the door, and Mrs. Cake called on the children to let Blitzen go now. Faisal slipped put a back door and followed them all the way to the stagecoach stop, which Angua hadn't anticipated but was touched by. She trod on Haddock's foot to stop him reacting to their pursuer, and leaned into the kid and let him hug her and pretend not to be upset. He watched them most of the way out of Ankh-Morpork, on the slow stopping stage to Pseudopolis. Haddock probably couldn't see him, but Angua's vision was much better than a human's. She knew exactly where Faisal was. She hoped he wouldn't get beaten up on the way home, but he was quick and nimble; there probably weren't that many in Ankh-Morpork who could catch him to begin with.

Ludmilla Cake welcomed then with surprise, and (when she saw Angua) shock. Angua rolled her eyes, and went through the same old exhausting litany of where she'd been and what had happened. She was glad to be back in human shape again, but at least humans respected it when wolves snapped at them to lay off. She was getting very tired of explaining.

Ludmilla fed her, at least, and talked enough about the political situation in Pseudopolis that Angua, exhausted as she was, picked up the bare minimum of important facts. Ludmilla worked for the clacks, and though it was in theory a minor administrative position in practice that meant she went everywhere and heard everything; of course she would be a useful contact for Haddock.

Good for her. Angua stewed through dinner, went to bed early, and pretended not to hear the anxious questions to Haddock about whether she was really all right.

How would Haddock _know_? 

He was smart enough to answer noncommittally, anyway, and Angua went to sleep and dreamt troubled dreams. Or not troubled - but she dreamed that Carrot was by her side, so vividly she could have turned over in his arms and kissed him, except that she lay on sand, and Carrot, she knew, had not come to Klatch with her - and somehow, somehow, she knew that something was wrong, and woke to remember all the worst again. 

Angua ate the breakfast Haddock had laid out for her and left early, before dawn had really broken. It was still uncomfortable shifting back into the wolf shape when she wanted so badly to immerse herself in the human - but better by far than Ludmilla Cake's pitying eyes. She had memorised the route to Crundells, and taken advice from Ludmilla on local hazards, though once she got outside the city limits she'd likely be on her own. Ludmilla had grown up a werewolf in the Shades: unlike Angua, who had taken weeklong hunting holidays the same way her mother's friends had taken their children skiing, she tended to stay close to home.

For safety's sake, Angua got off the roads as quickly as possible. Ludmilla said that everyone on the Sto Plains was on high alert. Prince Cadram said publicly that he had no intention of expanding any further and would not have briefly occupied Ankh-Morpork if it hadn't been for the unprovoked acts of aggression committed by that state, but everyone knew that was as much a lie as the word _briefly_. A newspaper called _The Times of Ankh-Morpork_ had until recently printed underground, supported by its largely dwarven printing staff: two human journalists and most of the printers had escaped when their office was raided, but the press had been smashed to pieces in Sator Square, and nobody knew what had happened to Otto Chriek, the iconographer. _The_ _Times_ had reported out that Governor Rust was a figurehead taking orders from Prince Cadram and Ankh-Morpork remained under total Klatchian control the morning before the raid, and the staff had carried the last issue out with them when they ran. Ludmilla had shown Angua a copy, headlined ANKH-MORPORK STILL UNDER OCCUPATION, the front-page photograph captioned _A lie can get around the world before the truth has got its boots on_.

Given that none of the dwarves had actually been Ankh-Morporkian, the Low King had declared this the final straw and broken off diplomatic relations with Ankh-Morpork. And commercial and diplomatic clacks traffic from Überwald, according to Ludmilla, had slowed to a trickle, indicating that someone with power there had valued Otto Chriek and wanted to see his jailers or killers punished. Lady Margolotta, Angua guessed, raking up the haphazard political education she had picked up as a teenager and thinking as she ran. She wondered how useful a confidential agent who was also an iconographer would be. The answer was probably very, if they were as charming and smart as Otto. She'd met him at Biers, when he was still a jobbing iconographer.

Anyway, the Low King was angry, Lady Margolotta was displeased, and everyone on the Sto Plains was on their last nerve. Angua could smell the anxiety, and see the well-polished weaponry, the new fortifications. The road over to Quirm never used to be so well-fortified.

Angua hoped Lady Sybil really did know where Vetinari was, and that his lordship really did have a plan, or this tension was going to turn to war faster than you could say _ally_. And from what Pessimal had said, the Klatchians were already stretched and lashing out. It wouldn't take much for someone to take advantage of that, or for the Klatchians to react to some troop movement or new infrastructure. They'd all be up the Ankh without a paddle then, which (knowing the Ankh) would probably be fatal.

It took three days to get to Crundells, moving quietly and discreetly. The emergency bag left with Cheery had been a real emergency bag, for flee-the-city situations rather than caught-short ones, so it was well supplied. Angua paid for whatever she took, and steered clear of anything that looked like a watchman, staying away from towns and dealing warily with villages. Not that there was much law here in the Shires, even after years of Mr. Vimes stamping his idea of what it meant to be a copper all over the Sto Plains. Angua knew the sort of thing. Rolling hills, lazy river, thatched cottages with flowers in boxes and a single main street, punctuated by gentry homes a little way away that housed the local magistrates but not the local lock-up. It was all very far away from the tramp ship sailing to Ankh-Morpork, and further still from the sands of the Hubwards Klatchian deserts, which they said the D'regs could read like a book but remained illegible, and nearly fatal, to Angua. It was soothing, sleeping in well kept woods, drinking from clean streams (and avoiding the anglers) so long as she remembered that this was the kind of idyllic countryside where they read a textbook and held a show trial before ducking witches in the pond. The witch still drowned.

Angua did not struggle to find Crundells. It was so large its footprint distorted land ownership and local society for at least ten miles around, which Mr. Vimes had probably sensed all the way from Ankh-Morpork. He would have hated it. Maybe that was why he'd never visited - that, and even Angua, who knew him better than most, couldn't imagine him out of the city where he had been born and where he had died…

Grief was like a missing stair. Angua tripped over it for Cheery every time she slipped into the emergency dress and wondered if her hair was tousled or merely ragged; for Carrot when her dreams were empty, missing the underpinning rhythm of his soft, regular breathing. When she looked for leadership, and instinctively for. Mr Vimes, both her feet plummeted straight through that missing step and her heart sank. There was no more guidance or cynicism to be found there, only Mr. Vimes looking over her shoulder, expecting her to choose _right_.

Angua wondered when Lady Sybil missed Mr. Vimes. She was never going to know the woman well enough to ask, of course. 

It was sunny here, the weather undisturbed by the smog of the city, the citizens at relative ease so much further from Ankh-Morpork than the Sto cities. Angua spent an afternoon lying outside the pub in a village near to Crundells, accepting pats and a good meaty bone and chasing the odd thrown stick, and listening to the men and women talk about poor Lady Vimes, up at the big house. Most of it was useless speculation; some of it cast Commander Vimes as a hero he would have spat on. (Street to street fighting around Cockbill had become a valiant last stand before the Patrician's Palace; out here they still called it the Patrician's Palace.) But Angua learned, at least, that Lady Sybil had brought her dragons and a few young friends to Crundells - "prob'ly fleeing the Klatchians," nodded one gentleman, "who knows what they're like with ladies," and was squashed by the publican's wife, who had clearly had some kind of dust-up with her spouse and snarled that they were likely no worse than men anywhere - and that she walked alone of an evening, in the gardens. Terrible heartbreaking it was to see.

Angua gathered that a lot of people had been fascinated by dear tragic widowed Lady Sybil, and equally that a lot of people were lucky not to be ash. Anyone less gracious than Lady Sybil would probably have flambéd the countryside by now.

The sun was lowering in the sky. Angua accepted one last pat, then went off to collect her belongings, bury them under a different bush closer to Crundells manor house itself, and lie in wait for Lady Sybil. The woods were well kept here, too, with visible signs of vigilant gamekeepers and thoughtful management. But Lady Sybil liked quality, didn't she? Angua had been to Scoone Avenue; everything there was well beyond her watchman's pay, but it wasn't ostentatious. It was the expensive good taste the Baroness would have killed to have (and incidentally to be able to pay for). It was no surprise that things were well managed in Lady Sybil’s childhood home.

The house was enormous and so were the gardens. But the people in the village had made references to the rose garden, and the fact that they saw her at all meant Lady Sybil had to be walking somewhere reasonably public. Some careful reconnaissance identified a spot where the wide lawns behind the main wing of the house were visible from a local lookout point on Hangman's Hill, which overlooked but didn't overshadow the house. The rose garden was off to the left - you would be able to see a woman entering it - and the lawns ran right up to the edge of the woods, though the woods grew more ornamental and less wild as they went on, and though there was a ha-ha in the way. Beds of flowers, so far as Angua could see, were restricted to a wildflower meadow with a carefully managed wilderness, some decorative beds close to the house, and the rose garden itself. The kitchen garden alone was about the size of the meadow, never mind the extensive orchards. Ramkins didn't seem to like anything just for show, which made sense, considering.

There was also a newer building which was carefully downwind of the stables and well clear of the main house and home farm. It reeked of dragon. Angua stayed well away from it.

She changed long enough to put her collar on, buried her bag in the woods a respectable distance from the ha-ha, and went to wait. It didn't take long. The late afternoon light spilled across the striped lawn like honey, and one of the tall Quirmian windows split open, disgorging a slight teenaged girl with middling dishwater blonde hair, demurely dressed in grey, and Lady Sybil, dressed in black from head to foot, right down to the black lace cap pinned to her chestnut wig. 

Angua cursed internally. She didn't want witnesses to this encounter, but neither did she want to spend another night in the woods risking detection by Lady Sybil's gamekeepers. She hesitated a moment, but then Lady Sybil waved the girl back into the house, saying something that Angua's finely tuned ears didn't quite catch about speaking to Cook. The girl curtseyed just slightly and stepped back into the house, and Lady Sybil walked down the steps like a pirate ship in full sail and set off across the lawn alone.

Angua watched her for a few moments before breaking cover, and swallowed a couple of times against the lump in her throat. Lady Sybil wasn't exactly beautiful, in the same way Commander Vimes hadn't been exactly handsome. But she had been tall and strong and moved with a kind of brisk, assured grace. She'd always dressed to flatter herself, too, except when dealing with dragons, when she dressed to escape being flattened. The severe black dress she wore now hung on her, and gave the impression of a woman who had lost muscle and flesh. Her face, though Angua couldn't have said if it was more or less full, was pale and tired with disconcertingly sallow undertones. Worst of all, she moved with slow, painful hesitation and a slight stoop, leaning on a sturdy stick. Not a cane, like Lord Vetinari. A stick. A solid, gnarly, well-polished and well-used one.

Angua was going to find the soldier who had brought Mr. Vimes down, and if he was very very lucky and she was very very good the man would make it all the way to the hangman without suffering a dark and midnight _accident_.

Angua trotted out of the woods towards her, and saw very clearly the moment when Lady Sybil noticed her and stopped. Angua's heart beat in her throat; Lady Sybil knew who she was, but she wasn't sure that at this moment the older woman would recognise her. She kept the trot calm and casual, and was rewarded by Lady Sybil's beginning, very slowly, to walk towards her again.

Halfway across the striped lawn they met, and Lady Sybil leaned heavily on the stick she was carrying to stoop down and see Angua's badge. Angua bared her throat to make it easier for her, expecting her wolf's instincts to kick back and protest ( _her pack, she was leader, she_ -) They didn't.

Up close, Lady Sybil looked more tired, but less mortally ill. She smelled odd, too; Angua breathed in to try to catch the scent, and then stopped when she realised Lady Sybil had taken her own deep breath to speak. Her eyes were shining too much to be quite right for a human, and her mouth was trembling just slightly.

Carrot always said that Lady Sybil had cursed and fought the men who dragged her to the dragon. But she hadn't wept. The same stone ball of misery that had been plaguing Angua since she set foot in Ankh-Morpork and learned of Carrot's death, and which seemed to be with her no matter what body she wore, beat a tattoo up and down Angua's ribs.

"Oh, corporal," Lady Sybil said eventually. "We're a long way from the city now, aren't we?"

The whine crept from Angua's throat before she knew what it was, and she pressed her head into Lady Sybil's free hand.

Lady Sybil chuckled, and caught herself up on a sniffle. She pulled a black-trimmed handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose firmly. "Why don't you show me where your things are, and we can talk properly?"

Angua led Lady Sybil into the woods, and Lady Sybil politely faced a tree without any hinting so that Angua could change and struggle into her dress with hands that had recently been claws. She had been friends with Angua's mother, however partial that friendship; she must know you just didn't watch someone change.

Angua cleared her rusty throat and tugged at her dress so it hung straight.

"I'm decent," she volunteered, and Lady Sybil immediately turned round and opened her arms to her, stick and all.

"Oh, my dear," Lady Sybil said, folding Angua into a hug like a city engulfing her. "I am so very glad you are alive."

Angua drew in a ragged breath, and surprised herself by clinging to Lady Sybil.

"Angua, I am so sorry. You must have been told? Poor Captain Carrot. I am so sorry."

For the second time in the last week, Angua burst into tears.

When Angua had managed to get her breathing under control, and when the tears had largely dried up - assisted by Lady Sybil’s spare handkerchief - they sat down with their backs against a large oak, and Angua stared emptily into the distance. She felt like the day after a great storm, when the floods were still high but the air was clean and sharp. The rain would return, but not right now, and in its place was a kind of blankness.

“I don’t know how much Commander Vimes told you,” she said slowly. Lady Sybil’s silence had a listening quality. “I went to Klatch, following a lead that dried up. On the attack on Prince Khufurah. I thought…”

Lady Sybil waited. Angua pleated the handkerchief into the tiniest possible folds, and reminded herself that if there was a politically independent Ankh-Morpork left Lady Sybil was in charge of it.

“I thought the threat came from Klatch,” she continued. “Not the caricature clues we found, something serious, using that rubbish as a blind.” 

"Sam agreed with you."

Angua swallowed hard. "Good," she said at last. "Good."

There was a long pause.

"It took me a long time to get back," Angua said. "I didn't know where I was, and - and when I got out of the desert, it was chaos." She fell silent, thinking of the passengers on the tramp ship, so tired and so desperate for hope, some of them with belongings already whittled down by losses from Leshp. Pacification, Angua thought, was like land enclosure, which Carrot had once spent a mind-numbing hour telling her about in the context of the Sto Plains immediately around Ankh-Morpork. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and everyone called it progress. The difference was that pacification was happening now, and it wasn't even a crime, because for a crime to exist there must first be a law. Angua knew of none.

She cleared her throat and continued with some difficulty. "I got back about a week ago. The city - it - well."

She looked at Lady Sybil. 

"You don't have to tell me," Lady Sybil said composedly. "I've seen it recently. Sam would be very angry."

Angua nodded. "I was escorting a group of kids. They thought I was their-" she winced - "pet. Anyway, I took them to my old lodgings. My landlady told me about Carrot." She paused, and breathed in and breathed out, and pressed her clenched fist to her forehead so that the knuckles dug in, the handkerchief wrung between palm and gripping fingers. "They've set up a secret shrine to him. A _shrine_. I could drown them. They won't let him rest -"

Angua's voice spiralled out of control. Lady Sybil laid a hand on her wrist and grasped it gently, and Angua's voice broke off into harsh breathing, like she had been running.

"If I had a penny for every time I have heard someone say _Old Stoneface wouldn't stand for this_ ," Lady Sybil said quietly, almost dreamily. "It becomes a prayer."

Angua choked and laughed, sharp and abrupt and involuntary. "Poor Mr. Vimes." She wiped her face with the handkerchief. 

Lady Sybil smiled, and folded her hands in her lap. 

"He'd be proud of the Watch, though," Angua said. "They've gone underground, but they're still there." She blew her nose. "But you already knew that."

Lady Sybil's smile broadened to show teeth. Angua wondered if Governor Rust had ever seen that smile.

"I'm commander now," Angua said. She fingered the badge at her collar. "There's no-one else left."

"Sam would be proud of you," Lady Sybil said. Angua leaned her head against the tree and closed her eyes, and for a few long moments said nothing.

"Thank you," she said, when she could trust her voice. 

Lady Sybil clasped her dirty, scraped hand, and held on tight. Angua gripped back. 

After a few minutes, Lady Sybil let out a deep sigh, and said brightly: “Well, we can’t have you sleeping out here in the woods.”  
  
“Probably not,” said Angua, startled but feeling too sluggish to show it. The stone ball of grief had spasmed repeatedly over the last half an hour, so hard she wanted to double over and scream, but it had settled into a kind of uneasy quiescence. Now she just felt a sinus headache settling in, dull and painful, throbbing along her cheekbones and up the sides of her nose. “You have effective gamekeepers.”  
  


Lady Sybil’s smile wobbled a little. “Sam and I always preferred to hire good people, pay them well, and keep them on. Although of course he had very little to do with Crundells.” She released Angua’s hand gently, and brushed her palms over her black skirts. “We haven’t much time to plan. My walks are quite short these days; I’m still recovering. Jocasta will come looking for me soon if I don’t return. And I don’t want you to appear, obviously a werewolf and a member of the Watch, on my doorstep right this instance; we’ll need to be more strategic than that.”  
  


Angua remembered, with an effort, what Haddock and Stronginthearm had said about Lady Sybil’s hospital. “The Governor is watching you.”  
  


“Gravid Rust has always been a weaselly little toad,” Lady Sybil said calmly. “Wily, but overconfident. He’s paid off my butler to report back to me. Now, Silver’s little drinking problem will shortly lead me to pension him off. But in the meantime he must see you arrive respectably, under a different name, otherwise a certain concealed owner of Sam’s acquaintance may be turning up sooner than intended.”

This confused Angua, until she remembered Commander Vimes’ violent objections to the enormous sword 71-Hour Ahmed carried with him - the only thing, Angua thought, anyone ever remembered about him, that and the very strong accent and even stronger smell of cloves. Getting an accurate description of 71-Hour Ahmed would probably require a golem: eidetic memory, complete imperviousness to human accents, and (so far as Angua was aware) no sense of smell. Not that it would help, because any witnesses would only remember whatever other overpoweringly distinctive features 71-Hour Ahmed had assumed that day. 

He was Prince Cadram’s enforcer, Angua remembered. Sent here to manage Gravid Rust and to prop up the Klatchian occupation of Ankh-Morpork. The expensive, unruly occupation of Ankh-Morpork, isolated by broken relations with the Low King and Überwald, rendered pointless by the disappearance of Leshp, sowing discord with Hubwards neighbours like Quirm and the Sto cities, drawing resources away from the already unmanageable regions of the Klatchian empire…

No, not a dinner guest anyone wanted to show up. Except maybe, if you were very cunning and laid your plans very well, at the appointed time. Angua got the feeling that she was stepping on to Lady Sybil’s chessboard.  
  


Angua tipped her head up and thought. “I had a sister,” she said at last. The pain of losing Elsa was duller and easier to carry than the pain of losing Carrot; she had borne it for so long. But unlike Carrot, she thought Elsa would have preferred her to ditch her personal scruples in the name of survival. “Elsa. My brother Wolfgang killed her several years ago, but nobody else knows that… or will admit to it, anyway.”

Three of the four von Überwald siblings had been from the same litter: Elsa was the last, the only human yennork, and the youngest, if only by two years. She’d been nineteen when she vanished, and the Baron and Baroness had searched for her, but not too hard. Otherwise they would have found that Wolfgang had killed her. But they’d known it, they’d all known it, and when Andrei had disappeared in the night they hadn’t looked too hard for him either. It was after that that Angua had begun to trend towards vegetarianism and what her parents and brother called _picky eating_. No-one had cared. And no-one had ever proven what happened to Elsa. In the end the Baroness had simply told people she’d run away, and Angua - well, Angua had said the same. She’d hated every word, but she’d gone through with it.

If 71-Hour Ahmed knew she was a werewolf, and he had known - the silver collar testified to that - then it was impossible to be sure what else he knew. But it probably included the fact that Angua used to be called Delphine, and that she’d had a sister who had run away. Unless he’d been to Überwald himself and asked some very hard questions of some very hard people who would not have been willing to give him any answers at all - Wolfgang cast a long shadow - he almost certainly didn’t know that sister was dead. Angua hadn’t told anyone except Carrot.

“I did know your mother at school,” Lady Sybil mused. “We could say I’m your godsmother. And I often have young people to stay. So I think we’ll arrange for Lady Elsa von Überwald to come for a visit. Which means you have to come from somewhere… I think I’d better invite Felicity for dinner...”

Her voice trailed off, and she nodded decisively. “Now this is what we’ll do.”

An hour later, in that awkward twilight time where it’s neither night nor day and where a door opened from a lit house isn’t as obvious as it will be in an hour’s time, Angua trotted up to the side door of a pretty country cottage built into the hill near Crundells, spat out her bag, and scratched at the door. It opened immediately, and a small, slightly plump woman in her early thirties, with spectacles and an easygoing face. She blinked at Angua, and then re-read the powder-blue note in her hand.

“Lady Sybil is the most astonishing woman I’ve ever met,” remarked Felicity Beedle, publishing sensation. “Why on earth she was only ever _Deputy_ Head Girl is beyond me. Do come in. I’ll run you a bath.”

Angua padded indoors, bringing her bag with her.

“The privy is the next door on the left if you would like to change,” Felicity Beedle said absently, re-reading the note once more and staring suspiciously out into the gathering darkness. “I think Lady Sybil will probably be sending Jocasta along from the big house with some clothes for you, everything I have is mourning, but -”

Angua stepped behind a door, slid into human form as quickly as possible, and reassumed her now very dirty emergency dress. “That’s fine,” she said. The ball of grief bounced against her ribs. “I’m also in mourning. Thank you for your hospitality, er -”

“Mrs.- Miss Beedle,” the author said, with a familiar stumble over the honorific. Angua winced for her. “Felicity Beedle. Do call me Felicity.”

_Don’t make me think about my dead husband_ , Angua translated. She shook hands awkwardly. “Angua von Überwald… but I’m supposed to be using the name Elsa.”  
  


“Incognito, terribly exciting,” Felicity said, less as if she meant it and more as if she were living up to expectations. “Lady Sybil did say any guests of mine would be very welcome to come for dinner tomorrow.” She shook herself. “In any case, my dear Lady-”

“Elsa,” Angua interrupted.

“My dear Elsa. You’re six inches taller than I am and you look like you badly need feeding. There’s probably enough fabric in one of my dresses for you, but it’s all in the wrong dimensions.” Felicity rubbed the end of her nose thoughtfully. It looked like a regular tic: there were smudges of ink there. “You won’t mind a quiet evening, I hope? Rarebit and salad for tea. I have a dreadful lot of copyediting to do on my latest.”

  
“Your book?”  
  
“Yes. It’s called _Daphne and the Nose Pickers_.”

Angua blinked.

  
“I daresay you think a woman with any proper feeling would retire to the countryside to weep, rather than write books about bodily functions for small children, but I don’t have any proper feelings and I do have a lot of bills.”

“I mean,” Angua said, and found that her voice was suddenly rather rusty. “I’ve retired to the countryside to overthrow Gravid Rust and arrest Prince Cadram, so I can’t throw stones.”  
  
Felicity Beedle smiled suddenly and fleetingly. It had a razor blade in it. Angua thought she had probably once been a happily married, cheerfully optimistic woman. “Elsa, we’re going to get on well. Now, I’ll make you a cup of tea and run you a bath, and see about finding a nightgown of mine you can wear until Lady Sybil sends that dreadful girl down with something better.” 

“What dreadful girl?” Angua asked, standing out of the way while Felicity Beedle began to bustle.

“She’s not really dreadful - I just say she is because it makes the poor child smile. The Klatchian Assassins took over the Ankh-Morporkian Guild, including the school. They allowed the girls to stay enrolled, though they don’t take girl pupils themselves, but Jocasta’s brother got into an argument with one of the Rust boys and disappeared. Mr. and Mrs. Wiggs pulled her out of school and Lady Sybil invited her to stay.”  
  
Wiggs, Angua thought, and mentally joined up some dots. “Oh, she’s the one that used to fall into the Ramkin Manor dunnikin.”

“I beg your pardon,” Felicity said, sliding a cup of tea under Angua’s nose. The cup and saucer were delicate; they had little yellow primroses on. Angua handled them awkwardly, afraid of breaking them. She was always clumsier after a few days as a wolf.

“Miss Band - she was one of the teachers at the Guild - used to send overconfident or badly behaved pupils to try to case Commander Vimes’ house. A kid called Jocasta Wiggs got sent a couple of times. Ended up in the dunnikin twice and the compost heap once, I heard.” Commander Vimes had come into Pseudopolis Yard laughing that day. But he liked the kid, as much as he liked any bloody Assassin. He wouldn’t have stood for the brother disappearing, that much was for sure.

Felicity let out a disbelieving giggle. “I must ask her to give me her opinions. Background for my next book.”

“ _Jocasta and the Dunnikin_?”

“I was thinking _The World of Poo_.” 

Angua smiled, and sipped her tea.

True to Felicity’s word, Angua had bathed (the less said about the condition of the water after she’d got out of it the better, but she was clean, right down to the skin under her toenails), dressed in a nightgown that came down to just below her knees and an enveloping black shawl, and eaten two helpings of rarebit and salad by the time someone stealthily entered the kitchen, having jimmied open a dodgy window Angua had mentally noted and decided to fix the following day.

Angua picked up the late Mr Fotheringhay’s pistol crossbow, having had it explained that her married name and her wedding ring were the only two things of any significance Felicity had chosen to set aside once widowed. The crossbow lessons Mr Fotheringhay had given her were of much greater importance than a name that had always gone badly with ‘Felicity’ in any case.

  
“Elsa! No! That’ll be Jocasta. She always comes in through the window.” 

  
“Um, am I interrupting?” said a chirpy, friendly voice from the kitchen.

“You’re breaking and entering,” Angua said, annoyed. 

Felicity rolled her eyes and put the enormous sheaf of papers covered with red pen on her lap desk away. “Come in, Jocasta.”  
  


The girl who emerged into the light of the snug where Angua had been reading (and mentally correcting) a book about werewolves was the same one who had spoken to Lady Sybil on the lawn earlier that day, except that now she was dressed in a haphazard collection of dark clothes that would hide her effectively in the night and be impossible to explain if she were found. She had a large dark knapsack on her back, too, and it looked very heavy. 

“Lady Sybil sent me,” she said, eyeing the crossbow warily. “With clothes? For Lady Elsa?”

Angua had taken off her collar and badge and put them into a bedside drawer of the pretty little guest room Felicity had given her. It contained a lot more in the way of creature comforts than Mrs. Cake’s, and unlike that room, the bed would definitely hold Carrot without his feet sticking out the end. Angua tried very hard not to think about what it would have been like to come here with Carrot - say if he’d only been injured, if he had only been _nearly_ killed. Without her badge, Jocasta Wiggs wouldn’t recognise her. The Assassins’ Guild School had very little to do with the Watch, except for that one time Cheery had caught the Selachii twins up to no good. And very clearly Lady Sybil hadn’t mentioned her real name.

“Thank you,” Angua said. 

“Just pop them in the apple blossom guest bedroom and I’ll make you a hot chocolate before you have to go back,” Felicity said. “Were you followed?”

Jocasta Wiggs shook her head. “I thought someone spotted me but Jethro dropped his mug of ale on their foot.”  
  


Felicity smiled faintly. “Good man, Jethro,” she observed. “Elsa, would you like a hot chocolate?”  
  
“Yes please,” Angua said. Felicity bustled out - she had a tendency to bustle, the same way Angua had a tendency to move as much as possible, and tense up when stationary; Angua thought it probably had something to do with widowhood - and a light bloomed in the kitchen. Pans were heard to clatter.

Jocasta Wiggs didn’t go anywhere. “Lady Sybil said you came all the way from Klatch,” she said. “Was it exciting?”  
  
  


Angua gave this question due consideration. “Was being in Ankh-Morpork exciting?”  
  
The girl’s face visibly closed off. For a moment, Angua felt slightly bad.

“No,” Jocasta said quietly. “Did you lose a brother, too?” 

Angua wished she could lose Wolfgang. Preferably into ashes inside a silver urn. “No. My -”

She ran up against a problem of words. She had never had to refer to Carrot as her anything: he was simply Carrot, and while assorted people referred to him as her young man and Mrs. Cake had once induced hysterics in Ludmilla by referring to him as Angua’s gentleman caller, nobody had ever felt the need to name the relationship as such. Everyone in Ankh-Morpork knew what they were to each other. 

“He was mine,” Angua said eventually.

“I’m so sorry,” Jocasta said, more softly than Angua would have expected. Angua bit down hard on her lower lip with canines that were longer than intended. “I’ll go and put these in your room. Lady Sybil said she’d order some more things for you as soon as she could see to your measurements, but in the meantime, you’re about Susan’s height, so these ought to fit.”

“Thank you,” Angua said. Jocasta went away and left her to her book. Angua heard Jocasta and Felicity talking in the kitchen, and did not sharpen her hearing to listen to what they were saying.

She passed a silent evening with Felicity, except for the occasional glottal goblin curse when Felicity found her copy-editor particularly exasperating, and went to bed early, with the fine warmth of a hot drink in bone china still between her clumsy hands. She fell asleep, and did not dream, except briefly - when she woke in the middle of the night to the impression that Carrot lay beside her, his even breathing rising and falling against the curve of her spine, his heavy arm lying across her waist, and fell back to sleep, feeling safe.

It transpired that Susan - Susan Sto Helit, Duchess of Sto Helit, apparently - did wear clothes that fit Angua, but there was a quality to them that warned Angua that the moment she stopped charging around the countryside on inadequate meals and began to eat normally they would be too small. Angua also did not think that strict charcoal wool up to the neck was her personal style. It was sufficiently tight around her throat that she had had to detach her badge from the collar and put it onto a chain lent to her by Felicity.

Nonetheless, Angua put in a pair of gold earrings that had been in a velvet pouch at the bottom of the bag, packed everything else into a practical (and expensive) leather bag, and went to dinner with Lady Sybil. It felt a bit ridiculous going through the motions of a polite society dinner - not something she’d been much exposed to, though long-dormant rules of conduct taught to her by the Baroness on family visits to Genua resurfaced throughout the evening - and Angua was sure she was gaining a reputation for being taciturn and snobbish. She decided she didn’t care and played up her accent. In one corner of the drawing room after supper Jocasta Wiggs was telling the curate that Lady Elsa was lovely, she just didn’t warm up to new people easily, and that she didn’t know everything but there was something very sad in her story, and wasn’t Lady Sybil just the person you would want to stay with if you were sad, Reverend? In another corner Felicity was skilfully fending off Mrs. Pickings’ attempts to get free copies of her latest book for the grandchildren, and saying how nice it was that her old friend had been able to drop by on her way to visit Lady Sybil, though the shocking mix-up with her luggage was so regrettable, these days you are hardly safe on the high road, etc etc. Angua wondered if she knew that when she lied her voice took on an absent-minded quality, probably only audible if you were a werewolf or Lord Vetinari. In a third corner of the room, Lady Sybil was talking to Mrs. Makepeace about keeping in touch with old schoolfriends, and how she hadn’t seen her godsdaughter since Elsa was quite a little girl.

Angua was occupying the fourth corner, playing chess with Mrs. Makepeace’s husband and rapidly developing a headache. She was not cut out for spycraft. Fortunately Colonel Makepeace was far too used to being talked down by his wife to choose to make conversation, and therefore seized gratefully on a game of chess. Angua played two games with him: one loss, one win. She was grateful when the party broke up and he got up to leave, politely, without making any great fuss. His wife and half the other ladies of the region seemed maliciously fascinated by her in a way she could do without, but he seemed nice enough.

Lady Sybil sent Jocasta to bed with a letter from her parents, and invited Angua to her study for a small snifter before bedtime. Angua went along with it, and wasn’t surprised to find that the study itself was packed with false doors, false cupboards, and a lot of books in which all kinds of seditious material could be hidden. Including - and after her conversation with Bashfullsson Angua wasn’t even surprised - an entire wall full of books on dwarven history and culture, to go with the two walls on dragons. Human history and geography was considerably restricted by comparison. 

Lady Sybil poured Angua a very small glass of brandy. It kicked like a unicorn.

“Tedious, I know,” Lady Sybil said, though Angua hadn’t said anything. “You’re tired, and you deserve to rest and recover. I know I was fit for nothing, the first few days after Sam died. I certainly couldn’t have done what you have.”  
  
“I don’t believe that, Lady Sybil. I’ve heard about the hospital.”

Lady Sybil smiled faintly. “Do call me Sybil, my dear. And Rosie really did a great deal of work there. She was completely invaluable. I could trust her with anything.”

“What did you trust her with?” Angua asked, immediately suspicious, but Lady Sybil smiled and changed the subject.

“What are you living for right now? Honestly?”

Angua sat back in her chair like she’d been brought up short and nearly spilled brandy all over a duchess’s dress. Sybil poured her another one.

“We’ll get you some clothes that fit better, incidentally. Quite apart from anything else, Susan visits fairly often. Dear girl. Very practical. You’ll like her a lot.”

Angua sipped at her brandy. Her mind had gone blank.

“The job,” she said slowly. “The case.”  
  
“And if we were to walk into Ankh-Morpork tomorrow,” Lady Sybil said quietly, “with Lord Vetinari on the Patrician’s chair, and the Klatchians gone. What then?”

“The prosecution,” Angua hazarded. “The.” She stared at Lady Sybil. “I don’t know. It’s too soon. Everything I cared about is - except the city. If we could get the city back…”  
  
Lady Sybil held her gaze until her voice trailed off.

“I find it helps to think smaller,” Lady Sybil said, after several long moments of silence. She unlocked a drawer, removed several items from it, then removed a false bottom and then a second, much thinner, hidden section. “My great-great-uncle could be terribly paranoid,” she said absently. “Here.”

She handed Angua a handwritten birth certificate, and a sketch of a newborn baby. Angua stared at the certificate, and then, finding it incomprehensible, looked at the picture instead. It had been done with a shaky but skilled hand, in the same ink that had written the birth certificate. The child’s tiny hand was curled around an edge of blanket, its wizened little face scrunched up.

“An iconograph would have been too great a risk, you see,” Lady Sybil said softly. “Imps talk.”

Angua went back to the birth certificate and read it again, more slowly, forcing herself to absorb each letter. It was dated about two months before; the place of birth was Ankh-Morpork, at the Lady Sybil Emergency Hospital. Witnesses were Dr John Lawn, attending physician, and Mrs.. Rosemary Palm, Guildmistress. The boy’s parents were Lady Sybil Vimes and Commander Sir Samuel Vimes (deceased), and his name was -

“Sam’s first sergeant was called John,” Lady Sybil said. “John Keel. A great influence on him in a terrible time for Ankh-Morpork. And then of course the doctor…” She folded her hands neatly on her lap. “It seemed appropriate. And then I wanted my name to be carried on, and I thought it would be so apt to memorialise Sam’s ancestor. I did think about the name Sam itself, but -”  
  
Angua had always been very careful not to risk children with Carrot, but she thought of naming a baby after him after his death and shuddered involuntarily.

“- Quite.” Lady Sybil cleared her throat. “So that’s what I trusted Rosie with. He’s a healthy boy, by all accounts, though the birth was difficult. It was lucky that I was already in a hospital.”

“John Suffer-Not-Injustice Ramkin Vimes.”

“I believe Rosie calls him Jack.”

Angua laid the certificate and drawing very carefully on the desk, and then knocked back the rest of her brandy. Thoughtfully, Lady Sybil poured her a third.

No wonder Lady Sybil looked ill. She was in her early forties, and carrying a baby in secret after being widowed must have been hell itself. Hiding it, too; no wonder she affected poorly fitting clothes, no wonder she _seemed_ ill. The only wonder was that there wasn’t an Igorina on the premises. 

“You’re the bravest woman I know,” Angua said frankly. All this, and she was carrying out clandestine diplomacy for Vetinari? Did Vetinari know?

“Hardly.” Lady Sybil nodded at the paper on the desk. “So that’s enough for me. That’s enough to look forward to, after we’ve won. That is the promise of a world I want to see. My son, and Sam’s, back in his rightful place, in a free city. That’s what I’m looking forward to. What about you?”

Angua picked up the drawing again, and studied the baby’s face. Newborns didn’t really show resemblances but this one scowled just like Commander Vimes.

“I look forward to training Probationary Constable Vimes,” she said at last.

Lady Sybil laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * *You may ask where the boats that brought them to Leshp had gone. The answer was back to their home ports, to count their profits and sell more berths. [ ▲ ]


	3. 71-Hour Ahmed's Choice

71-Hour Ahmed was not enjoying his extended sojourn on the Central Continent, but he saw no prospect of bringing it to an end. The Seriph's retirement increasingly complete, and Prince Khufurah still tragically 'missing', Prince Cadram was the law of the land throughout the Empire - including its recent Ankh-Morporkian acquisition. And 71-Hour Ahmed, as a good and loyal servant of his Highness, was bound to go wherever he was sent, which in this case was to Ankh-Morpork, to impose order. He'd been here for six months, since Governor Rust's previous Klatchian advisor had somehow drunk some Ankh water and been invalided home: they said the poor man's bowels would never be the same again. 

It was like trying to impose order on a deadly jellyfish. No, on a bay's worth of deadly jellyfish. Impossible to grasp and lethal if caught. Sir Samuel had policed the city, but Sir Samuel had had fifty-plus Watchmen and forty years' experience of its streets. If Prince Cadram had made disastrous mistakes in this campaign, allowing one of his more bloodthirsty generals the latitude to capture the city and failing to stipulate that Sir Samuel and Lord Vetinari should be taken alive was one of the biggest, closely followed by his permitting Rust to decree that carrying a Watch badge was a hanging offence. Ahmed had nothing to work with, and though one man shrouded in mystery and bearing an enormous sword might achieve more than expectations would suggest in isolated oases, Ankh-Morpork was a different story. Ahmed would stake his mother's fearsome reputation that nothing about him had been mysterious from the second week of his stay in Ankh-Morpork, and the people here weren't impressed by large swords. Their last civic tyrant had been a _dragon_. 

In their brief acquaintance Ahmed had only ever seen Sir Samuel smile at his wife. The man had more usually been scowling or seething. But now sometimes he dreamed of the mob, and Sir Samuel leaning against a wall laughing, and asking him what he thought he was going to do now.

If only Vimes had followed him to Klatch like he was supposed to. Ahmed had been sure taking the werewolf hostage would work -

"Are you payin' _attention_ , man?" whined Gravid Rust. He probably thought he sounded as calmly, ominously authoritative as Vetinari. 

Somewhere on the list of Prince Cadram's disastrous mistakes - headed, of course, by invading Ankh-Morpork - had to be 'putting Gravid Rust in charge of anything'. Ahmed understood the theory that the man's stupidity made him easily led, and his high position kept a lid on some of the city's major families, but Rust gave him a headache. And besides. No Morporkian gave a shit about Rust. He didn't understand the city: he just lived off it. Harry King would have been a smarter choice.

"Of course, offendi," 71-Hour Ahmed said, woodenly. He recognised the signs. The man was about to give him some incredibly stupid order. 

"You will proceed to the Shires. Fetch the Vimes woman. And bring her back. By force, if necessary!" 

And there it was, Ahmed thought, the most foolish order ever given to a policeman since the last order Rust had given him. If only Gravid himself had gone to war. Ahmed could have arranged an appropriate accident.

"I will fulfil your orders, my lord."

"Governor," Rust pressed, and snapped his fingers for more wine. What a sot. And not even a goodnatured one, like Prince Khufurah.

"Governor," Ahmed said, rolling his eyes internally and daydreaming about snapping off one of the fancy bits on Rust's chair in order to shove it somewhere painful. "Excuse me. I will see to your wishes directly."

He had been housed in the Governor's Palace, a building he still instinctively referred to as the Patrician's Palace, if only inside his own head. This made it very convenient to get back to his rooms, and even more convenient for Rust to call for him at any hour of the day or night. He seemed to have mixed Ahmed up with some kind of personal servant, and Prince Cadram's only comment on the subject was to remind Ahmed that he was there to solve the problem of the unprofitable occupation of Ankh-Morpork, not to complain about the hired help. Ahmed wondered how stupid Rust had to be not to realise that he was the man who would trim him down to size if Rust ever stepped out of line.

Maybe stupid enough to believe your personal law enforcer wouldn't notice if you tried to organise a quiet little assassination and force a war right under his nose. But Ahmed tried very hard not to think about that. 

In any case, he had more than enough to occupy him wondering what he was going to do about Lady Sybil Vimes, and her perfectly blameless countryside widowhood. So what if she had had personal connections to Lord Vetinari? The man was gone, and his old power base in the city dwindled in influence with every day. So what if she spoke dwarfish, and corresponded with some dwarves? The woman corresponded with half the Central Continent. Had more care been taken with regards to the Low King's subjects her dwarfish pen pals wouldn't have been worthy of note, let alone suspicion. Lady Sybil had been nothing but gracious, though they had earned her hatred. She was powerfully intelligent, well-connected and rich, and Rust wouldn't get anything good out of antagonising her.

Ahmed would have liked to go for a long walk, or better yet a run, to restore his equilibrium. But he was uneasily certain that he was not safe alone on foot in Ankh-Morpork - he had only travelled so once, to a dinner at the Assassins' Guild, and unfriendly eyes had followed his every footstep to the point where his hosts had insisted on an escort back to the Palace. He might have tried the gardens, but only small portions of them had been disarmed, and they were not safe. Most Patricians had not been outdoors people, and Lord Vetinari had seen the historical value of preserving the original B.S. Johnson landscaping. The fact that any killer approaching from the garden would probably end up at the bottom of a ten-foot-deep ornamental fountain or the ho-ho was a separate matter. The general in charge of the invasion had initially thought that there were pockets of resistance in the Palace's extensive grounds, until Ahmed had stepped in and explained that Ankh-Morporkians actually valued the criminal negligence of their most famous architect. 

That left only his rooms and the limited practice space. As a talisman against Rust suddenly remembering something and summoning him, Ahmed went to the practice space and threw knives at a target board while he tried to think clearly.

Governor Rust thought Lady Sybil was in charge of some kind of conspiracy. ( _Thunk_. A knife hit the board, dead centre.) Some group aimed at dislodging Klatchian hegemony and restoring Vetinari to the Patrician's Palace. ( _Thunk. Thunk_.) He based this on the fact that Lady Sybil exercised influence - both personal and monetary: the Ramkins had always been rich, and Lady Sybil was shrewd - across most of the continent, knew Vetinari well, and corresponded a lot, including with dwarves the Rust administration had officially proscribed contact with after diplomatic relations were broken off. But if there was anything seditious in Lady Sybil's letters or clacks traffic, Ahmed had yet to find it. The Dearheart woman was certainly reluctant to bring the Ramkin-Vimes clacks traffic for analysis, it was a toss-up as to whether the cloud around her head was suppressed rage or cigarette smoke when she showed up, but she did show up. No-one could say that Lady Sybil's correspondence hadn't been scrutinised, and there wasn't anything in it except the friendly accounts of nothings and somethings sent by a caring woman accustomed to maintaining an enormous acquaintance. In fact, Ahmed happened to know that one of his fellow operatives had been ordered to approach Lady Sybil and request her assistance in a rapprochement with the dwarves. She had politely declined on the basis that her year of mourning was not yet complete. 

_Mourning_. Ahmed blinked, and realised he was out of knives. He trod forward, retrieved them from the board, and returned to stand at a more challenging viewpoint.

No-one could accuse Lady Sybil of behaving without grace or dignity. ( _Thunk_.) Ahmed had accepted the invasion of Ankh-Morpork as just one of those things that happened, especially when your opposition was laughably incompetent, like the late Lord Rust. He hadn't been surprised to find the city on fire: it had burned and flooded at least twice when he was a pupil at the Assassins' Guild, watching from the rooftops, ready to defend the guild buildings. ( _Thunk. Thunk_.) He had banged a few heads together when he'd realised the extent of the damage, and shouted at the fools who had allowed Sir Samuel and his deputy to be cut down in the street, like they weren't keys to keeping the city under control. Did no-one else do their research? Ankh-Morpork had no king. She needed no king. But Carrot Ironfoundersson was the king they didn't have, and Samuel Vimes was the man who'd taught him everything he knew. ( _Thunk. Thunk_.)

And Lady Sybil had asked only permission to sit with their corpses and hold vigil, patient as the grave; she had started a hospital in her own home in the midst of the fighting, and she had sat next to her husband's cooling body and cried in silence, back perfectly straight, hands folded in her lap. ( _Thunk, thunk, thunk_.) Ahmed remembered standing with her to make sure nobody got any ideas about hurrying her along, and he remembered watching the crowds who came - to weep for Captain Carrot, yes, and also to look at the Klatchian soldiers ready to maintain order by whatever means necessary and murmur to themselves that Old Stoneface would never have stood for this. It had been an unforgivably foolish unforced error. But no-one could say Lady Sybil had in any way caused it. Even Prince Cadram had written her a gracious letter of apology, blaming her husband's death on the fog of war and condoling with her.

The board split in half and his latest knife clattered to the floor. 

"Which son of a diseased camel did you buy this from?" Ahmed demanded conversationally. The armourer flinched.

"It is the last of the batch we bought from Dibbler, offendi. We have changed supplier -"

Ahmed snorted with unexpected laughter, and ignored him. Some things, apparently, never changed.

That afternoon he got on a fast coach for the Shires. The fastest way to go would have been by riverboat, but the Quirmians controlled the upper stretches of the river, and while they were not actively hostile towards Klatchians travelling up it they certainly weren't friendly, either. All kinds of special diplomatic permissions were required, and while Ahmed normally considered these a courtesy detail, like a free biscuit with his coffee, he had no desire to rock the boat. Metaphorically or literally. So he got the coach.

The roads had been much improved by invasion anyway.

Owing to hills, misplaced bridges, and other topological inconveniences, it still took him two full days to reach the exact area of the Shires where Crundells lay. And even then his driver was not sure how exactly to reach the great house, so Ahmed declared they would stop in the village to stretch their legs and freshen up before arriving on Lady Sybil's doorstep, as a matter of courtesy. There was no real need to be courteous, and indeed Rust would probably prefer it if he had bowled in, flattening the landscape on the way, demanded a four course feast and all the conveniences of the house for himself and his men, and granted Lady Sybil an audience some time in the next week. But Ahmed didn't share Rust's overconfidence and he saw little point in antagonising a middle-aged widow who had done no harm to him or anyone else. Especially in this kind of busy little hamlet where everyone knew everyone else's affairs. It was just the sort of place Ahmed usually enforced the law, if you swapped out some external features of the pub and the vegetation - there weren't any pubs called The Goblin’s Head in Klatch, for the simple reason that there were no goblins - and while he could have gone through it like a dose of salts and departed triumphant at the midnight hour, he felt more diplomacy was called for in this instance. He was not supposed to bring Lady Sybil back to Ankh-Morpork over his saddle.

Ahmed went into the pub, ignoring the way it hushed instantly, and bought a round of drinks, the opportunity to use a wash basin, and care for his horses. All three were provided, though the man behind the bar (an old copper, if Ahmed was any judge at all) was visibly reluctant to let go of his little assistant under the counter.

Annoying, but not unexpected. Ahmed smiled blandly at the man.

_I know what you are and you know what I am and you know that if I draw this sword no-one is getting out of here alive, least of all you._

He paid, ignored the fact that he received short change while simultaneously making it very clear that he had noticed and would be keeping it in mind for later, and attended to freshening himself up and trying to think what to say to Lady Sybil. He hadn't actually spoken to her, except a few meaningless sentences of condolence, since Sir Samuel's death.

When he strolled outside to check on the horses - he hadn't been landed with a bunch of incompetents, because he picked his own men and he didn't tolerate that sort of thing, but it was as well to show an interest in the goings-on - he found that they were being watched. Not just by locals idly clearing up after market day (and taking an extremely long time about it: those half-built stalls and crates apparently took hours to dismantle) but by someone tweedy and elderly, more expensively dressed, whose frilly wife abandoned him with a hissed "Well, if you choose to _lollygag_ , Charles," and whisked off.

Ahmed waited a few seconds. He didn't recognise the man, whose hair was whitening, and who had a slight stoop in his shoulders. But from dress and mannerisms he knew him. The kind of Ankh-Morporkian soldier too old to fight; an officer who liked to think of himself as a gentleman, and who might or might not be, depending.

The coach ride had been very boring: Ahmed was sick of reading up on the Vimeses and the Ramkins, sick of the very minor mind games he could play with mine host of the Goblin’s Head, and even sicker of trying to play Thud against himself. The game had been recommended to him by the temporary troll ambassador to Ankh-Morpork, before Her Excellency Opal had been rejected by Governor Rust on the grounds that Vetinari accepted that sort of thing but new and more intelligent management was in town, and Ahmed had a strong feeling that without appropriate tuition he was missing out. He decided to play a game he understood better, and strolled over and lit up a clove cigarette.

"A fine afternoon," he remarked, offering one to the man, who paused and then murmured quietly that he no longer smoked. Yes, that was the old familiar accent, strongly tinged with Pseudopolis, but much as Pseudopolis might not want to admit it they had been part of the Ankh-Morporkian hegemony for decades. This one didn't look like one of his Assassins' Guild classmates; Ahmed diagnosed a younger son, sent to Hugglestones before the army, now keeping a kind of proud genteel poverty in the countryside. "No? A pity. They are very flavourful but I have always considered it rude to smoke in an otherwise occupied coach."

"You have not had a difficult journey, I hope?" 

"The roads from Ankh-Morpork are quite good," Ahmed said, and watched the tiniest sliver of ice glitter in the man's eyes. "Lord Ahmed al-Hashashiyya. May I know who I am addressing?"

Al-Hashashiyya. The assassin. Ahmed was a D'Reg, his mother having taken her husband to her own people, and didn't actually have a surname. He didn't need one. The D'Regs were sufficiently tightly knit and well organised not to require them: Ahmed knew who his second cousins twice removed were, he didn't need a surname to tell them apart. But many of the countries that made up the empire did use surnames, including the dominant polity Prince Cadram had been born into, and Prince Cadram had both decreed that Ahmed required a surname and saddled him with this one. It was, as he pointed out, purely factual, given Ahmed's education, and it irritated Ahmed no end. Fortunately he was seldom called on to use it. Everyone knew 71-Hour Ahmed. 

"Colonel Makepeace," said the man, who didn't seem to recognise the word or the name. Possibly not everyone knew 71-Hour Ahmed. Ahmed inclined his head politely. "You're visiting in the region, Lord Ahmed?"

"I knew Lady Sybil's late husband. I haven't had the opportunity to call on her."

A slight intake of breath. "You must be very busy."

Ahmed flicked ash off his cigarette. "His Highness's service is very demanding. Is she a neighbour of yours?"

"Her parkland abuts my garden, yes. But the estate is extensive."

"So I have heard." Ahmed took a deep inhale and exhale. He could get to hate the taste of cloves.

A slight pause. Ahmed waited, patiently, for the fish to rise to the fly. The problem with this one was that he was a nice man; Sam Vimes would have confiscated Ahmed’s sword and banged him into a cell at Pseudopolis Yard by now. With a receipt for the sword.

"I hope there won't be any trouble."

"In that, colonel, we are united."

The colonel looked like he wanted to say something. Idly, Ahmed placed a bet on whether it was a threat or a plea.

"Do you expect to stay long?" the colonel said, instead. 

"Some few days. It will depend on Lady Sybil." Ahmed removed his cigarette from his mouth and eyed it. "I have no wish to inconvenience her."

"Of course." The colonel looked at him with a troubled eye. "Of course."

Ahmed let the silence sit.

"Well, I must be going."

Ahmed bowed slightly. "I will hope to see you in the neighbourhood before I leave."

"Sir." The colonel returned the bow and walked away, perhaps to collect his frilly and unpleasant wife.

A good man, Ahmed thought. But a shamefully easy target. 

He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the dirt road.

It took so long to travel the few miles to Crundells that the coachman began to suspect treacherous Morporkian sabotage at the top of his voice. Ahmed rolled his eyes so hard he thought they would get stuck in the back of his head: the coachman was an Al-Gebra boy born and bred, and Al-Gebra was a planned city. Ahmed banged on the ceiling of the coach until the complaining stopped, then stuck his head out of the window and informed the coachman that he wasn't being lured to his doom, he was just in the countryside. And of course he would miss the unmissable turning if he didn't keep his eyes on the road, the stupid offspring of a dog.

Within half an hour they had passed the gate house and were sweeping up the drive to an enormous, and enormously elegant, house. Ahmed did not admire the style of construction particularly, but he'd been educated in Ankh-Morpork long enough to know that he was looking at the platonic ideal of a country residence, complete with soft golden sandstone glowing in the late afternoon sun. He couldn't imagine Commander Vimes here; too indefensible, not enough pavement. But Lady Sybil, who was so welcoming and generous - she would suit this place. 

He was expected. A clacks had been sent before his departure; he had written it, not trusting that task to one of Rust's clerks. Efficient staff led by a butler called Willikins greeted him at the door, ushered the equipage and servants away, and showed him directly to the book room, where the ladies were at present. Ahmed accepted the offer of refreshment and proceeded into the book room as Willikins held the door open for him.

His sword had been laid in a for-the-purpose rack in the hall, at least two minutes' sprint away, and by the time the book room door clicked shut behind him Ahmed was horribly aware that he should never have let it leave his hand. A kind of primordial panic nailed him to the floor, and he ruthlessly suppressed both it and the desperate instinct to wrench the door open and run.

He had faced Corporal Angua von Überwald before. She hadn’t been expecting him to recognise her for what she was, and he had had a silver collar in his hand. He had thought it very likely that she had fled into the desert and died: none of his agents had heard any whisper of her. A shame, but there it was. Now she was here, staring implacably at him from a well-upholstered armchair, and he had no silver on him, nothing more than a couple of knives and a garotte, and there was a faint growl rumbling in his back of his brain, too low to be truly heard by his ears -

"- so I will want your translation of _Demain, dès l'aube_ tomorrow, Jocasta, and please prepare some discussion points in addition to that." A schoolmistressy voice cut through the air, and Ahmed belatedly recognised that there were two other women - no, one woman and a schoolgirl of fifteen or sixteen, wearing neat, proper lavender - in the sunlit book room. The second woman rose, and Ahmed recognised from his briefings on the influential of the Sto Plans the Duchess of Sto Helit, with her distinctive black-and-white hair. She was dressed in austere charcoal, and as the sun gleamed off the curve of her pale cheek Ahmed was struck by some sudden and unnerving memory he couldn't quite grasp.

She curtseyed to him, and the schoolgirl followed suit. Corporal Angua unfolded herself from her chair and curtseyed abruptly without ever taking her eyes off his.

They displayed Carrot Ironfoundersson's body outside the Patrician's Palace, Ahmed thought, heart thundering. They buried him in a secret, unmarked grave, and sent nothing but a letter of condolences to his mother. If she passed through Ankh-Morpork, she knows that.

"Your lordship," said the Duchess of Sto Helit coolly, dragging his attention away from Corporal Angua's murderous grey eyes. Her own were brown and judgemental, with something - strange about them, something else he couldn't put a name to, the same memory. "Lady Sybil informed us of your likely arrival. I regret that her health is not strong at present, and she therefore rests at his hour. I am instructed to bid you welcome to Crundells. I believe we are acquainted… in passing."

"Indeed, your grace," Ahmed said courteously, wondering where the bloody hell he was supposed to have met this woman. His mental filing cabinet threw up the information that, while Duchess Susan was her father's sole heir, she spent relatively little time in Sto Helit, dedicating herself to a career in education and leaving the administration of her estates to capable bureaucrats. Ahmed didn't spend a lot of time around schoolteachers. But she was familiar, and it wouldn't hurt to pretend a little.

The duchess bowed her head. "May I make known to you Lady Elsa von Überwald, Lady Sybil's godsdaughter -"

Corporal Angua inclined her head, and Ahmed's train of thought derailed. 

"I wonder if we have also met," he said, staring at her. "In Ankh-Morpork, I believe… your ladyship." And on a fast diplomatic yacht, and in the desert, and...

"No," Corporal Angua said, with a pronounced Überwaldean accent. Most civilians, like the publican at the Goblin’s Head, would have reacted to that deliberate pause, but Sir Samuel trained his people better than that. Ahmed's brain, frantically ticking over, eventually produced the knowledge that Corporal Angua had had two known siblings who could assume human form: the heir, Wolfgang, and a sister, Elsa, who had run away as a teenager. "You perhaps have met my sister Delphine. There is a strong resemblance, I am told. It has been several years since we met."

She spoke carelessly, callously; she didn't sound like the watchwoman, who Ahmed had never spoken to directly, but who he had overheard. Corporal Angua was quiet and measured, and after so many years in Ankh-Morpork, the edge had worn off her accent. This young woman carried less muscle, and looked less tired; she dressed quite differently, though of course clothing was the first and most powerful disguise, and her fair hair had been caught up in a coronet. The apparent slight elongation of her face might be due to the style, or it might be that they really were two different women. The use of Corporal Angua's original given name - largely unknown in Ankh-Morpork, but not a difficult detail to discern if you invested in a copy of Twurp's Peerage with the Überwaldean annexe, which cost roughly twice as much due to the printing expenses associated with printing vampiric names that went over three pages - argued for that. 

Ahmed decided to go along with it. "It must be so." He bowed. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Elsa."

Lady Elsa - if that was who she was - bowed her head.

"And Miss Jocasta Wiggs," the Duchess of Sto Helit said, indicating the schoolgirl, who was watching him with avid fascination and not a little distrust.

Ahmed's heart, already less than buoyant, sank a little more. The oldest Wiggs boy had crossed one of the Governor's young relatives; a schoolboy argument, and it should have stayed that way, but of course, with Rusts involved it hadn't. Ahmed had found out about the situation when Miss Band, Jocasta's housemistress, had approached him discreetly, teacher to distinguished alumnus. He was still trying to find out what they'd done with the boy - a considerable source of irritation, especially since in ordinary circumstances it would have been child's play, and since Miss Band had hinted delicately that the Rust boys had attributed Wiggs Major's disappearance to him. This ought to have been a minor social awkwardness (the boy's disappearance wasn't his fault, and he could hardly have been expected to prevent it) but combined with the presence of Lady Sybil, someone he felt obscurely guilty towards, and a woman who might or might not be Corporal Angua, and someone whose calm look reminded him of all the worst crimes he'd ever witnessed, Ahmed strongly felt that Offler had it in for him today.

“Miss Wiggs,” he said politely.

“Lord Ahmed.” She dipped a curtsey. He bowed his head.

“I believe Willikins will be waiting to show you to your rooms when you wish,” the Duchess said composedly. “We dine early, at seven. I would be happy to show you a little of Crundells, if you would like to stretch your legs after the coach ride.”

“I would not wish to disturb you in any way,” Ahmed said, with perfect truth. The Duchess had brown eyes, he was sure of it, but he kept catching the faintest hint of distant and pitiless blue in them.

“You would not. Jocasta has a conversation class with Lady Elsa now.”

“A class,” Ahmed repeated, his eyes sliding to the alleged Lady Elsa. What in the name of Offler’s snaggle teeth would a runaway werewolf have to teach an Ankh-Morporkian schoolgirl? Some of Sam Vimes’ patented dirty tricks? Sir Samuel’s men had been slaughtered, but the division that had gone after them had paid for it.

"Conversational Überwaldean," Lady Elsa said, smiling like a predator and sounding uncomfortably as if she knew what he was thinking and thought it was very funny indeed. "Fräulein Wiggs has a strong basis in the grammar but her accent requires work."

"I will leave you to your lessons, then," Ahmed said as gracefully as possible. "Your Grace, thank you for a most thoughtful offer, but it has been a long journey and I would appreciate the chance to rest before presenting myself to Lady Sybil."

The Duchess of Sto Helit gave him a brief, steady look under black lashes that made him think of a poisoned oasis in the desert, and a man who had confessed to murder believing that he had an hour still to live. "Of course," she said. "As you prefer, my lord."

There was a strange echoing quality to her voice and Ahmed's spine was itching. He made his bows to the ladies and left, pausing for a second outside the book room door to listen for he didn't know what. Commentary? Muffled laughter? Some indiscreet joke from the very young Miss Wiggs? The supposed Lady Elsa, dropping her accent in favour of Corporal Angua's voice?

There was only silence. Ahmed did not shiver as he walked away.

Dinner was a very early affair. Ahmed came downstairs to find the ladies already assembled, Lady Elsa bringing Lady Sybil a glass of water and talking to her in low, confidential tones, and Duchess Susan inspecting an ornamental sword displayed on the wall with a clinical eye. Ahmed wished powerfully for a sword, but if he wanted to maintain the pretence that this was a voluntary social call he couldn't turn up with the practical weapon his palm itched for and otherwise useless dress swords were not worn at dinners in the country. He could lean on his Klatchian accent and pretend he didn't know better, but Lady Sybil was too well aware that he did for the wearing of a sword to be perceived as anything other than a threat. 

He noted, absent-mindedly, that he had correctly assessed the evening's level of formality by turning up smartly dressed and wearing the decorations (but not the mess dress) Prince Cadram had pressed on him. The ladies were wearing evening gowns but not jewels - the duchess in something severely cut and shimmering aubergine, Lady Elsa in lace-trimmed black that lent further colour to the idea that she was in fact Corporal Angua gone into mourning for Captain Ironfoundersson, and Lady Sybil wearing the same simple black she had worn in Ankh-Morpork. Ahmed's eye was immediately drawn to her.

Lady Sybil had been… ill, after her husband's death, something poorly defined and unpleasant which had sapped at her strength and turned a jolly, healthy pink complexion sallow. At the official banquets she had dutifully attended, she had picked at her food. Her mourning black fit her poorly, as if her weight would not stabilise. From one of the city's most active philanthropists and civic worthies she became a recluse, leaving her dragons to her assistants and the hospital she founded in the hands of the head of the Seamstresses' Guild, who knew very little about medicine and a lot about making money go where it had to. It was expensive to get an informant inside the hospital, and compared to all the other things Prince Cadram and Governor Rust expected him to deal with it was low-risk, but Ahmed had heard that the one competent doctor in all of Ankh-Morpork was in constant attendance on Lady Sybil. 

She looked better now. Some of the colour had returned to her face, and her clothes now fit. 

He bowed, and was surprised to hear how sincere he sounded when he said: "Lady Sybil. I am relieved to see you looking so well. Please let me take this opportunity to express in person my condolences for your husband's death. Sir Samuel was a good man."

Lady Sybil bowed her head. She was wearing a heavy gold mourning locket, which gleaned in the lamplight. The other two women watched him like hunting hyenas, waiting.

"Thank you," she said. "I recall the two of you understood each other well. And I was very grateful for your kindness when I sat with him and poor young Captain Carrot."

_I didn't do anything_ , Ahmed thought to himself, but instead of letting this highly impolitic statement out of his mouth he bowed once more.

Lady Sybil smiled, and extended a hand to indicate a chair near her own. He inclined his head to the other ladies in the room, took a seat, and accepted a drink that Willikins mixed for him* \- in front of him, in fact, from the same bottle he used for the Duchess's drink. Lady Sybil was drinking something similar, though its pale colour and fizzy liquid could just as easily have been some kind of non-alcoholic sherbet. Lady Sybil had drunk very sparingly at any function where he'd seen her with a glass. The supposed Lady Elsa, however, was drinking blood red wine. Before dinner. A striking choice of aperitif.

He caught her eye by accident, and she smiled mockingly. He'd worn silver cufflinks and pins, which was no doubt tactless and ineffective, and for which he had no excuse; he had alternatives in other metals. He wondered if she could tell.

"I'm not a vampire, your lordship," she said, with obvious amusement. She sat on the sofa like she could spring off it and rip his throat out without a second's thought. "I drink… wine."

Ahmed inclined his head politely, torn between tension and irritation. "I believe we are missing one of our party," he said. Realistically, a teenager was no threat to him, but in among her delicate insinuations as to the rumours about Wiggs Major's disappearance, Miss Band had also delicately insinuated that Jocasta was a promising pupil the Guild would be sorry to lose. Best to keep an eye on her.

"Jocasta is a little young to be dining in company," Lady Sybil said. "She cheers the place up wonderfully. I don't know what I shall do without her when I return to Ankh-Morpork. After Jonathan's disappearance, I hardly think Mr and Mrs. Wiggs will allow her to accompany me."

Ahmed controlled his face very carefully. "You expect to return soon, Lady Sybil? I am sure your friends will be pleased to hear it."

"That's why you're here, isn't it?" Lady Sybil said, smiling slightly, politely, her eyes warm and open. 

"I would be more than happy to escort you, if you wished," Ahmed replied.

"I've known Gravid Rust so long I went to his baptism, Lord Ahmed, you must give me some credit for understanding the way he thinks." Lady Sybil sipped at her drink. "I have enjoyed my time at Crundells; it's been very peaceful. I really haven't visited since I married Sam, the countryside didn't suit him at all, so there are fewer painful memories here. I hope you will consider staying for a few days. The Shires are lovely at this time of year, and of course it is the shooting season. I don't dance myself at present, of course, but the hunt ball is always a charming occasion, and I wouldn't dream of denying Elsa and Susan the fun of it. Sam told me how interested you were in our Morporkian customs. You might enjoy it."

Ahmed was beginning to feel like he had walked into a dance that all three women knew the steps to, and was only avoiding a disgraceful (and given the high stakes, probably fatal) collision by sheer luck. He tried to match up memories of huntin', fishin' and brayin' classmates - most of whom had been in the habit of trying to smother him playfully with towels in the middle of the night, accompanied by cries of "raghead", until he'd broken a few other people's bones - with the pleasant and gentle-natured Lady Sybil, and came up blank.

"Do you hunt, Lord Ahmed?" enquired Lady Elsa, mild-faced. The red wine had stained her mouth dark.

_Yes - people, where necessary_ , Ahmed wanted to say, but the faint glitter in Lady Elsa's hard eyes told him he might get a response he wouldn't like. "On occasion," he said levelly. "I haven't had an opportunity to hunt in the Shires before." 

"It has a lot to recommend it."

Ahmed held Lady Elsa's eyes. He'd investigated Corporal Angua in relative detail after realising that she was Vimes' most trusted investigator, the wily left hand to Carrot Ironfoundersson's strong right. It was intelligent to know a thing or two about a werewolf in a relatively protected station when you were guarding a vulnerable principal. He hadn't heard of any deaths attributed to her. Publicly, at least, she professed vegetarianism. (How she managed in a country that couldn't cope without unnamed meat, Ahmed didn't know.) But who could tell how the sack of Ankh-Morpork had changed her? And who could be sure that this was in fact Corporal Angua, and not the unknown quantity of a sister?

"I'll bear that in mind, Lady Elsa," Ahmed said, and as Lady Elsa smiled, he immediately discounted any notion of a midnight flit.

Dinner was excruciating. The food was delicious. These things usually ended with a quiet port for the gentlemen, and the ladies retiring to a drawing room; but in this case Ahmed disclaimed any desire for port, since the situation was patently too serious for him to drink, and Lady Sybil announced that she needed to attend to some correspondence regarding business interests of Elsa's, and swept the younger woman off to her study with a pot of tea. The duchess mounted the stairs to what Willikins described as the small primrose sitting-room alone. 

"Your Grace," Ahmed said impulsively, and regretted it when she turned to look down on him. Her dress was backlit almost to black by the softly shining lamps on the stairs, yet a richer darkness than any true black fabric would be, and again he felt that shiver of recognition. "Do you also intend to return to Ankh-Morpork?"

"Perhaps. I have not decided." The duchess rearranged her skirts slightly, finickily. "My employment in Ankh-Morpork has come to an end."

"If Lady Sybil does indeed wish me to escort her to Ankh-Morpork, I am sure we could deviate to Sto Helit for your benefit."

"You're too kind," the duchess said composedly. She never sounded warm or friendly, Ahmed had noticed, despite holding Lady Sybil in obvious affection. "I will keep your thoughtful offer in mind. But I have duties that may call me elsewhere at any time."

"Duties to your estates, no doubt." 

"Among other things."

Ahmed began to feel a degree of irritation, and made the critical error of allowing mockery to creep into his voice. "Managing taxes, dispensing justice?"

"MY GRANDFATHER ALWAYS SAYS THERE IS NO JUSTICE," said Susan Sto Helit, in a voice that echoed like the depths of the sea, and the breath froze in Ahmed's throat. "THERE'S JUST US."

It took a moment for Ahmed's breath to restart, and when it did it rushed in and out of his lungs like air through a wounded sail.

"Good night," Susan Sto Helit said, and when she gave the slightest of curtsies her shadowed eyes flashed the blue of dying stars.

"Good night," Ahmed echoed, and stood still listening to his heart beat in his ears as she turned away and climbed the stairs.

The previous Duke of Sto Helit was no relation to his predecessor, a regicide who had got on the wrong side of Queen Kelirehenna within minutes of the beginning of her reign. His parents had been country people, who had died when the present duchess would have been a child. Her mother, if Ahmed was recalling his exhaustive and exhausting lessons in the good, great, wealthy and reprehensible of the Central Continent correctly, had no known parents. He remembered boys at the Assassin's Guild School lusting after her when she visited Ankh-Morpork as a young married woman: a mysterious silver-haired beauty…

_My grandfather always says_. Ahmed's bones rang with it.

A delicate cough nearly caused him to draw and throw a knife. He recognised Willikins and turned instead.

"Willikins."

The butler bowed very slightly. "Her ladyship would like to see you in the study," he said, "if you are not intending to retire immediately. She would appreciate the benefit of your advice."

Ahmed realised that, whatever mysterious dance Lady Sybil and her pair of harridans had led him into, he had now reached the head of the set and the next figure was about to begin.

"Of course," he said, and wished once more for his sword. "I would be delighted to be of assistance."

The study was a pleasant, warm, walnut-panelled room, soft lamplight glowing off heavy velvet curtains and leather-bound books. Lady Sybil was seated at an enormous desk, oversupplied with gilt and (more practically) drawers: she was studying a piece of paper intently, and when Willikins announced him she rose graciously.

  
“Can I offer you tea, Lord Ahmed?”

“A cup of mint tea would be wonderful,” Ahmed said politely, “if possible.”  
  
“I’m sure Willikins would be more than happy to assist. I should like one as well, Willikins, please.” She nodded to Willikins, who withdrew, and closed the door behind him.

There was a single split second in which Ahmed felt the shadow behind him that had been concealed by the closing door thicken, and he drew a knife and twisted to counter the threat just as Corporal Angua pressed a Watch-issue sword lightly to his belly.

There could be no doubt about it this time. The dress had been removed and the coronet had been taken down, and replaced by a straightforward braid. She wore the full uniform, from helmet to boots and the distinctive badge on a loose leather collar, she carried a heavy rosewood truncheon in her opposite hand, and she looked as if she wanted him dead.

“71-Hour Ahmed,” she said flatly. “Alias Lord Ahmed al-Hashashiyya.” 

“Am I under arrest, corporal?” Ahmed enquired, thinking about ways he could kill her, angles at which he could strike. Of course, without silver or flame she would rise with the next full moon, which was in a matter of days. But he could prevent that once she was no threat to him.

The sword pressed a little harder.

“Wrong on both counts,” Corporal Angua said. “Firstly, that’s Commander von Überwald to you. And secondly, you’re not under arrest, you’re assisting us with our enquiries.”  
  


Ahmed’s brain shaped the word _our_. His mouth was not so stupid as to let it out. He glanced back at Lady Sybil, who had sat down again and was perusing her piece of paper. It looked like a coded letter; she certainly had a codebook open on the desk, which was either very careless, or very confident.

Lady Sybil was not careless.

“My congratulations on your promotion,” he said.

“Thanks,” Commander von Überwald said. “Drop the knife.”  
  


He hesitated. His dear mother would have smacked him round the head if she ever knew he’d even considered surrendering, but he suspected this precious pair had him coming and going, and if there was one thing he’d learned as a D’reg in a decidedly unorthodox occupation it was that it never hurt to play for time.

“There’s a pistol crossbow in the drawer of my desk and I don’t want to have to use it,” Lady Sybil said with gentle rebuke, making a mark on the letter. 

Ahmed dropped the knife.

“Do please have a seat,” Lady Sybil said, broad back unprotected, except for the furious werewolf who would rip his spine out if he tried anything, and the fact that he didn’t want to hurt her.

There was a long pause.

Ahmed suppressed a sigh. Offler’s _teeth_. What was the point in fighting them? What would he defend if he did? They patently had some Free Ankh-Morpork plan in motion, which he ought to be rabidly opposed to, but what profit was there in Ankh-Morpork? It was no doubt a jewel in Prince Cadram’s hand, but it was a filthy jewel that sucked up money like a squid, and fought Klatch’s benevolent grip like a maddened stoat. So he had sworn some kind of oath to Governor Rust, theoretically, by proxy. The man was a poisonous little tit, and a selfish one too, who would rather throw parties than rebuild the city or clean up what still stood. And it was an understood thing that Ahmed’s oath only applied so long as Prince Cadram wasn’t annoyed at Governor Rust.

It was also an understood thing that Ahmed was a D’reg, and his oaths only applied when he felt like it. Which was why, rather than take the decisive action Prince Cadram would no doubt have preferred, Ahmed had kept Prince Khufurah alive and installed him somewhere safe and quiet. Compared to that, getting out of these women’s way was a bagatelle.

Ahmed took a seat.

Commander von Überwald sat down opposite him, sword across her knees, and Lady Sybil closed her codebook and turned her chair around so they faced each other, in a little seditious triangle of chairs.

“We’d like to make you an offer,” Lady Sybil said calmly. “The occupation of Ankh-Morpork must come to an end. But there’s no reason for excess bloodshed to mar that occasion, or for normal diplomatic relations not to be restored afterwards. You now have the opportunity to work with us to ensure a smooth transition and protect Klatchian citizens currently living in Ankh-Morpork.”  
  


Ahmed nearly laughed, but some part of him was disappointed. After the brush with Duchess Susan, the drama of Commander von Überwald’s appearance, he’d expected something a little less prosaic and yet a little more achievable, rather than the impossible presented in dry diplomatic language. “How will you arrange that, your ladyship?”  
  


“You get the details when you get on board, 71-Hour Ahmed,” Commander von Überwald said, leaning forward slightly and scowling in a way that reminded Ahmed of Sam Vimes himself. If Vimes had been here, he would have pulled the same face; if Vimes had lived, they wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“If you like,” Lady Sybil said gently, “you could travel north and speak to the Low King for corroboration. I would be happy to provide you safe conduct.”

Ahmed caught her mild brown eyes and stared. Of course she really _was_ running secret negotiations with the dwarves. Of course, of all the stupid things on the Disc, this was what Rust was _right_ about -

“Next you’ll be telling me Vetinari never left the city, your ladyship,” Ahmed said.

Lady Sybil merely smiled. Commander von Überwald snorted.

“I understand this is personal for you, Lady Sybil,” he tried, and watched Lady Sybil’s face turn to stone as his heart sank through the floor.

“You would not begin to understand how personal this is,” Commander von Überwald told him, pupils narrow and teeth half-bared, speaking in the soft low growl of a wolf with a human in its space. “Don’t act like you’re trying to.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and was careful to mean it. After a charged second, Commander von Überwald leaned back.

“Look, it’s simple, Ahmed. You help us, we give you what you want. The safety of ordinary Klatchians, and help finding Prince Khufurah’s attacker. Yes, I know about that. It’s my case too. I was there. I followed you to Klatch, remember?”

“How could I forget,” Ahmed murmured. He didn’t think Prince Khufurah remembered as such - he hadn’t seen the wolf, and was unlikely to think of a beautiful naked woman rushing through his chambers as anything other than a day with a y in it - but Ahmed hadn’t forgotten the entire episode. It had been his best chance to bring the whole sorry story to a close, and somehow he had bungled it.

Lady Sybil smiled thinly. “Well. There you are.”

“What happens if I don’t help you?” 

“The pistol crossbow is still loaded and Angua is faster than you are,” Lady Sybil said calmly. “Oh, come in, Willikins!”

The study door opened. Willikins entered with a teapot and three cups and a small pot of honey on a tray, bowed impeccably to Lady Sybil and set the tray on the desk.

  
“Will there be anything further, your ladyship?” he asked, apparently unconscious of the knife on the floor, the sword in Commander von Überwald’s lap, or the mysterious transformation of Lady Elsa.

“No, thank you, Willikins.”  
  
The door swung shut behind the butler.

“Admirable,” Ahmed said. “Your staff, I mean.”

“Aren’t they,” Lady Sybil said composedly. “Your answer, Lord Ahmed.”

There was only one answer. There had only been one answer since the day Ahmed realised his employer had set him to protect his younger brother and then used them both as tools to spark a war and kill Ahmed’s principal for the sake of his own greed. Not the first crime Prince Cadram had committed before Ahmed’s eyes, but the first that had a name, and a law against it.

There were times in every Assassin’s life when it was necessary to make the leap and act, and times in every D’reg’s life when it was necessary to break an oath. Because it was a lie, because someone else had forsworn it first, because it no longer applied. And there were times, too, in every policeman’s life, when evidence had to be faced.

“Yes,” he said. “I will help. Under those conditions: protection of civilians, and investigation of the attempted murder of Prince Khufurah.”

“Thank you,” Lady Sybil said, as sincerely as if he’d had any other choice. Commander von Überwald nodded at him slightly, but didn’t take those hard eyes off him. He supposed she’d earned the right to expect him to betray them.

Lady Sybil picked up the teapot. “Tea, Lord Ahmed?”

“Thank you,” he said, and added: “Just Ahmed, please. I am a D’reg. We have little need for titles.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Assassins, like women in bars, don't accept drinks they didn't see poured. [ ▲ ]

**Author's Note:**

>   1. Female trolls don’t strip to tease. Crystal and Emerald had heard of the Dance of the Seven Veils and choreographed an alternative involving a large number of diaphanous pieces of fabric and some ingenious quick-ties. Pyrite had two left feet, but she did have a deft way of presenting the bill that meant the reinforced dancefloor had already paid for itself. [ ▲ ]
> 



End file.
